


queen's gambit declined.

by lovelyorbent



Category: Deadpool (Movieverse), Deadpool - All Media Types
Genre: Absolutely no Mpreg, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Facials, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Non-Traditional Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Panty Kink, Porn With Plot, Public Blow Jobs, Time Travel, Topping from the Bottom, Vaginal Fingering, finding out about your future sex life via a time traveling murderer's discard pile, kind of scar kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-10-27 03:08:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17758625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: Nathan knows his body, better than most people thanks to the war he’s constantly waging against the left half of it, and he can feel his oestrus hitting him earlier than others can feel theirs.  Must be the repeated infusion of hormones, he thinks, losing Aliya and getting her back and then doing the whole thing again.  Her death was probably already going to send him into an early cycle, his body trying to find a new mate for him as quickly as possible, but he’s probably kick-started it into hitting even earlier by confusing it.  It’s going to start soon, probably tonight.





	1. D4

**Author's Note:**

> for my purposes here, i made up a bunch of shitty shitty slang from nate's time, male omegas and female alphas essentially have two fully functioning sets of reproductive organs, betas are basically just like, average fucking humans, and nathan is closer to comics size than movie size. also, i DO have a semi-non-handwavy explanation for the thing wade accuses me of handwaving, but idk if it's ever going to be relevant enough to make it in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i will earn the e rating after chapter 1, i promise. if u are here for the porn, i will give it to you, but later. this one just has sex jokes and some masturbation.

One bullet in the gun.  Nathan calculates its trajectory on the way up, balances his own motion with Russell Collins’ with the gun’s, and squeezes the trigger.

It _should_ be a perfect shot.  Center mass.

Wade fucking Wilson gets in the way.

As he hits the ground and Russell goes to his knees with a distraught expression on his face, the back of Nathan’s trapezius blazes like he’s been stabbed.  _Aliya_ , he thinks, panicked, the sensation so much a copy of the one he had felt when she’d died that it drops a stone of fear into his stomach before he can reason through it logically, but then Deadpool draws his attention to Hope’s bear.

It’s not pristine.  The left ear is stiff where she chewed on it as a toddler.  One eye is a little loose because she worries it when she’s feeling restless.  But the blood and char is gone.  Which means — he puts a hand over the fading throb — that’s Aliya’s telepathic bond with him, reasserting itself as a phantom ache in his claiming mark where it had been torn out as his wife had burned.  It’s still empty on the other end, no answering echo, like it’s been broken in half, but it’s not gone.  It hasn’t been torn out at the roots.

He misses most of the babbling, swept away by the relief, and only really tunes in when Deadpool starts talking to him.

It’s more fucking inanity.  Aliya would hate him.  And ever-practical, marching towards fate and trusting it would treat her justly, she would prefer to stay dead than have Nathan try to put a bullet in the head of some damaged fourteen-year-old jackass whose first kill either of them probably would have killed themselves, in his place.  So she would hate Nathan, too, for what he’s done here, for what he wanted to do here.  And she’d scold him for not taking the time to get more charges, so he could fix all the things he’s broken in his grief.  She’s a much better person than he is, that way.  If it were her, she would waste the last charge on the goddamn stupid martyr dying on the steps, who’s a much better person than he is, too, at least today.  It’s in her nature to always extend a hand, no matter the cost.  It’s a nature Nathan has always admired, but only ever pretended to share.

He’s too old to change his nature.  So he walks away.

And then, he stops.

He raises Hope’s bear to his face.  Inhales her scent, powdery and baby-sweet, even though she hasn’t been a baby for a long time.  There’s a little of his wife lingering there, too, and although Hope pulls him forward, Aliya pulls him back.  He’s too old to change his nature, but not too old to always wish he was different, for them.  Usually, it’s regretful.  Backwards-looking.  This time, there’s something he can do.  His gut wrenches as he makes the decision, and he clips the bear back onto his belt.

Then he opens the dial, and slides.

 

The taxi ride back becomes miserable before anyone even gets in, as soon as they realize that adding Colossus, whose shoulders are almost the width of the backseat, was a bad fucking idea.  “I should call the jet back,” he says apologetically, accented voice hissing a little through his broken teeth.

Nathan looks at the back of the car, rubbing his claiming mark again, absently.  The pain has faded, but touching it relaxes him, drives a bone-deep comfort into his muscle.  Even if he never sees them again, knowing they’re alive is enough.  It’s going to have to be enough.  “Probably.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Wade interjects, threading his arm through Colossus’.  “I’ll sit on your lap, baby.  And I’ll only grind a little.”

Russell rockets his hand up into the air.  “Shotgun.”

Domino pulls out her phone. “I’m going to get an Uber.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nathan mutters.

Wade points to Nathan’s hand.  “You pull a muscle trying to murder a kid lately?”

It probably looks awkward, he realizes, his flesh hand to his flesh shoulder, but he refuses to touch Aliya’s mark with the T-O hand, always has, even though in every other functional way, he thinks of it as just his left arm.  Maybe he should stop fucking fondling himself, even so.  He takes his hand away, adjusts the scarf instead.

Russell looks at him apprehensively, apparently rudely reminded of the fact that the ceasefire between them hasn’t really been ratified by all parties.  Nathan looks back, without expression.

Wade starts wordlessly humming, a tune that’s probably from a movie Nathan hasn’t seen, because Domino cracks a grin and Colossus rips his arm away to fix him with a Look, disapproving and almost stricken, like he expected better, even though he clearly has no grounds to expect anything but this from Wade.

Shifting his weight from foot to foot, Russell eyes Wade suspiciously.  “I _recognize_ that from somewhere.”

“The good,” Domino says, pointing at Colossus, “the bad,” she continues, pointing to Nathan, “and the ugly,” she finishes, pointing to Wade, who takes the epithet like a shot to the heart and collapses backwards.  Colossus catches him effortlessly with one silver palm and pushes him back into a standing position.

“ _What_?” says Russell.

“I feel so old,” Wade stage whispers, like he’s talking to someone who isn’t there.

 

Wedged into the back of the cab, with his metal shoulder shoved into Colossus’ metal shoulder, Nathan wishes he’d walked.  Russell has changed the radio station to something he likes significantly more than whatever had been on before, which is the only good thing about the car ride.  He’s dancing in the front seat, which Nathan likes significantly less.  He knows Hope is fine now, but the little bastard looking so cheerful still makes him grit his teeth.  Wade’s got his feet hanging off Colossus’ lap as he jabbers and into Nathan’s.  For the third time, he shoves them off his thighs.  Now that the relief has subsided, he feels irritable, and he realizes why when he takes an inwards breath of air, and Wade smells _good_ instead of just like he’s on fire.

Nathan knows his body, better than most people thanks to the war he’s constantly waging against the left half of it, and he can feel his oestrus hitting him earlier than others can feel theirs.  Must be the repeated infusion of hormones, he thinks, losing Aliya and getting her back and then doing the whole thing again.  Her death was probably already going to send him into an early cycle, his body trying to find a new mate for him as quickly as possible, but he’s probably kick-started it into hitting even earlier by confusing it.  It’s going to start soon, probably tonight.

Of everyone he’s met here, he probably likes Domino the most, but he’s glad she’s not in the car, because he doesn’t need another Break in here, gearing his endocrine system into rapid motion.  The cabbie is Null, Russell is a Skew, and Colossus is reading in his nose as nothing but warm metal, although he can’t be Null, since he’s a mutant.  But Wade’s scent is as fucking inescapable as the man himself, and with all the windows rolled up it’s stifling.  Even when Nathan doesn’t breathe through his nose, he can taste it in the air, like leather and salt, ash-warm and heavy.

Wade puts his feet back in Nathan’s lap.  It’s the last straw.

Nathan pulls out his knife, and lays it with purpose against Wade’s ankle, T-O finger putting leverage on the blunt edge.  Easier to slip between the joints here than put it through all the little metatarsals in his foot, even though that would probably hurt more.  “You want to waste more time re-growing bits today?” he asks.

“ _Cable_ ,” warns Colossus, probably ready to body him out the window if he twitches his finger.  Nathan would almost like to see him try.

“Take my feet home _later_ to satisfy your fetish,” Wade says airily, the motion of the front end of his boot telling Nathan he’s wiggling his toes in there as he withdraws his leg.  “I’m sure there’s a market somewhere in the freaky tags for you jacking off with my severed body parts, and I could be into that, but Russia’s Greatest Love Machine here has a problem with blood, and it’s an extra two hundred dollars if he throws up in here.”

Nathan has a headache from holding his breath as long as he can between inhales by the time the taxi pulls up at Xavier’s mansion, and he’s feeling murderous, but that’s normal, for him at least.  His first oestrus with Aliya, before she bonded him and his body had recognized her as _his_ , she’d had to wrestle him to the ground and keep him there before she could take care of him.  The T-O hadn’t quite reached his shoulder yet, then, which had made it a much fairer fight.  Her telekinesis hadn’t hurt, either.  He can still remember her panting over him like it was yesterday, triumphant and sweaty with his blood in her mouth, her hair shining in the sun, eyes glowing with half-feral joy.

Colossus gets out of the car, giving Nathan a funny look, which probably means he’s starting to smell like frenzy.  Wade tries to slip into his lap instead in the commotion, but Colossus puts a hand on his duct-taped waist to keep him from doing it.  It’s considerate if he knows the nature of the feelings that Nathan is experiencing, but although the thought is earnest rather than patronizing, it still rubs him the wrong way.  Everything is probably going to rub him the wrong way for the next two days.

Everyone stands still for a moment.  Wade starts singing that song again.

“Are we leaving or not?” Nathan asks when no one moves, fed up.

“I think Russell should stay here,” Colossus finally says.  “With X-Men.”

Russell immediately crosses his arms over his chest, and gains the hardened look of a child about to dig their heels in as hard as they can.  For a sickening moment, it reminds Nathan of Hope.  “I fucking won’t.”

“After you guys dropped his ass in prison for trying to burn some perverts?” Wade points out, at the same time.  “I can see why he’s not feeling warm and fuzzy about getting adopted by some weird bald guy.”

After everyone looks at him, Wade sighs.  “I didn’t say _I_ was adopting him.  I’m letting Cable take this one, so they can both learn the meaning of _ohana_.”

“Absolutely fucking not,” Nathan says flatly.

Russell sputters. “He tried to kill me!”

“ _Ohana_ means family,” Wade tells them.  “Family means no one gets left behind.”

“You are welcome here as well,” Colossus offers expansively, gesturing at the entire backseat and probably meaning both of them.

Nathan taps his fingers impatiently against the car door.  “No.” It’s hard enough keeping himself invisible from Jean Grey out here.  And he’s going to be in poor control of his telepathy very soon.

Wade shakes his head.  “If I spend more time around you guys my hymen will grow back.”

Nathan closes his eyes and prays for patience.

“I’m not staying here, I’m serious,” Russell says.  “What the fuck is this place, even.”

“It’s where young mutants learn to circlejerk,” Wade explains, managing to sound condescending, as if he’s not the one dragging this to hell.  “Bonus points for sanctimony while you yank it.”

“Where young mutants learn to _control their powers_ ,” Colossus corrects.  “It would be good for you.  X-Men provide structure.  Rules.  Appropriate environment.”

Russell opens his mouth, probably to swear more, and Nathan rubs the bridge of his nose, trying to alleviate his headache faster.  “I’m giving all of you thirty seconds to figure this out.”

“What is it with you and thirty seconds?” Wade asks, sounding genuinely curious.  “You know everything good takes longer than that, right?  Your wife must be so sexually disappointed.  Another way I’m like her.”

“Twenty-five,” Nathan says.

Wade cocks his head, somehow transmitting the impression that he’s pouting even through his mask. “That was absolutely only four seconds.”

“Twenty.”

“That was _maybe_ two.”

“ _Five_.”

“Fine,” Wade decides, and hops out of the car.  “Russell, let’s go take a tour of the worst MTV Crib since Kyle Sandilands.  I’ll stay, so you can tap out when you get sick of the bossy dickbag with the fancy glasses.”

Nathan gives Dopinder the address of the motel he’s staying at as soon as the doors close.  The two of them sit in silence all the way there, Nathan working on relaxing his muscles, which he hadn’t even noticed were tensed, now that the car smells mostly neutral again.  Halfway over the bridge, the cabbie reaches out a shaky hand and changes the radio station back to his music.  Nathan decides to reward his bravery by closing his eyes and resting his head against the seat back instead of saying anything about it.

When he gets out, he reaches across to pop the trunk, which Dopinder seems to have forgotten.  “I’ll go get money in a minute,” he says, and ducks out to grab his guns.

“Oh, DP never pays me,” Dopinder assures him, looking cheerful.  His front bumper is dented.  There’s blood on the hood, and a piece of cheap suit caught in the edge of the license plate.  It’s not going to be nothing to fix, even if there is a mechanic shady enough to do it.

Nathan looks at him, and the car, and decides perpetuating Wade Wilson’s exploitative habits isn’t in the cards today, even though he’d love to slap the back of the cab with his palm and see no one for the next week.  He could probably use some goodwill, and he’s not above buying it.  “Stay,” he says, using the voice he uses on Hope when she’s being disobedient.  It only makes Hope scowl, but it makes other adults follow orders like he’s holding a gun on them.

“Yes, Mr. Cable,” Dopinder responds, snapping to attention.

He counts out three hundred.  He hasn’t bothered to learn what money is really worth here, yet, because he has enough that he hasn’t had to worry about it, but there’s no way this won’t cover it.  _Extra_ two hundred if Colossus throws up has to mean it costs more than that to begin with, surely.

When Dopinder freezes after he hands over the bills, he thinks he might have miscalculated.  He should have known: textual interpretation based on what words actually mean isn’t a good way to think about anything Deadpool says.  “Um, Mr. Cable,” he starts, but Nathan, unwilling to admit his mistake, just waves his hand to silence him, and walks back towards his room.

 

Once he’s inside, he lays all his guns out on the bed again.  It’s part of the ritual of coming back from a mission.  He’s got to do it, can’t just sweep them to the side.  He isn’t exactly senseless yet, so he doesn’t have an excuse not to care about his weapons.  He’s just close enough to the raw beginnings of oestrus that he’s twitchy and annoyed and missing his wife, whose mark doesn’t hurt anymore.  She’d be right here with him if he was home, driving him to distraction just standing next to him helping with the maintenance, refusing to let him kiss her until they’re done, even if he begged.

Falling into the muscle memory of cleaning them all helps take him down from feeling like he needs to kill something, but he still feels like shit, and like if anyone talks to him, he’ll scream.  The bruises the Juggernaut left on him — to complement the ones from Deadpool, and Domino, and then Deadpool again — begin to smart as the last dregs of adrenaline ebb from his system.  By the time he’s done and comes out of the stupor of routine, he feels clumsy with tiredness, body aching with the ill-use of the past few days.

He’s getting fucking old, he thinks, as he puts everything away and drags himself into the shower.  The water here feels cleaner than in his time, and the pressure is better, and it’s hot, which takes away some of the throb of his muscles, and finally puts the headache to rest.  The ash and blood wash down the drain, and when he crawls into bed, the shitty, plastic-y sheets don’t absorb the water, leaving him cold.

Reaching up with his flesh hand again, he runs a finger over the mark again.  Now he’s naked, he can see the dipped edge of it, white with age, irritated pink at the edges from having his fingers on it so much.  Touching it feels like a comfort, but it’s not what Aliya usually does when he’s teetering on the edge of frenzy, irate but not yet needy, which is fitting her teeth gently into the imprint to let him know they’re off to the races.  Feeling stupid, he turns his head to try it himself, but he only manages to brush it with one canine — sending a harsh glow of want through him — and give himself a crick in his neck.

Fucking pathetic.  Just jack off, Nathan thinks.  It’s not like you haven’t done _that_ in twenty years.  He rolls onto his back, runs his hand from his neck down to his hip, and starts to stroke himself.  It’s probably not going to be enough for long, but he might as well get one off like this before it stops being satisfying.

The next morning, when he wakes up empty and sweating with it, he’s given up the ghost of thinking this was going to be fine.  He was thirty the last time he did this by himself and in that time he’s forgotten how much it fucking blows being alone when he’s so viciously, mindlessly horny he’s started wondering which vaguely cylindrical objects around him he’s brave enough to use as a dildo.  He grits his teeth, puts his metal fingers in himself because they feel less like his own inside him, and thinks in distracted, messy technicolor about kissing Aliya’s neck open-mouthed, biting down on her shoulder, panting into her collarbone while she fucked him open.

She’d probably be flattered by how much of their sex life he remembers in detail.  She’d probably find it funny if he told her he got off thinking about her experiencing one of these showers for the first time, going down on his knees for her on the tile.  And she probably wouldn’t let him go out first thing two mornings later when the fever breaks, because she likes taking an extra day to do fucking nothing and let him sleep off the exertion.

He opens the door of the motel room to throw the guns in the back of the truck before he pays off his stay and Deadpool is standing there, fully costumed, no duct tape this time.  Nathan closes his eyes and takes a deep breath to gather his patience.

Wade smells like gun oil and pot this time, instead of like sharkbait for Nathan’s animal hindbrain.  “Oh, good,” he says, “I was beginning to think you were never coming out of there.  The grief of watching me die must have been crippling, but we’re all dealing with it in our own ways.  Mostly by not having experienced it thanks to that little stunt you pulled.  Unfortunately, I’m a cinephile and I saw the movie a couple of times to be sure I got everything.”

“How fucking long have you been standing here?”

“Would you believe me if I said thirty seconds?”

“No,” Nathan tells him shortly, and pulls down the tailgate to slide his roll of weaponry in carefully before he slams it shut.  “How did you find me?”

Wade jabs his thumb over his shoulder at the cab parked in front of the office.  “I asked Dopinder where he dropped you off.”  Now he looks, Nathan can see the kid waving from the front seat, charmingly sunny for someone who recently had his first kill.  He’d felt twitchy for days after his first time, sure the blood smell would never wash out of his hair.  “Also, I’ve been finding and killing people longer than you’ve been alive.  Are you even alive yet?  You never said exactly when you were from.”

“If you’re going to try to kill me, make it fast, I’ve got shit to do.”

Wade barks a laugh, and watches him shut the door behind him.  It smells like a fucking whorehouse in there, and looks like a hurricane hit it, so he’s not about to invite him in.  “So where are you getting the money?  Place like this, it could be anything from selling feet pics to murder for hire.”

Nathan has been contemplating going to law school in between frantic bouts of fucking himself until he can’t see, but sure, feet pics.  The real answer is that the kind of people who have balls hanging from their trailer hitch also have antique shotguns in the bed of the pickup and a not insignificant amount of weed in the glove compartment, and selling that shit when you have unfettered access to the internet is easier than breathing in twenty-first century America, but that doesn’t seem like an answer that will get Wade off his back.  “Stripping.”

Wade waves a hand at him, like he’s trying to pause him, and then mimes dragging something over his shoulder and produces a tube of black lipstick from absolutely nowhere, smears it over the mask where his mouth probably is.  “You remind me of my wife,” he says, voice cracking down an octave.  It’s a credible impersonation, Nathan hates to admit.

“What do you want?”

“Where’d you disappear to for the last two days?”

Nathan gives him his most withering look.  “Where do you _think_ , genius?”

“Do you always answer questions with questions?”

“You did it first,” Nathan points out, and then shakes his head when he realizes he’s gotten dragged into the dirt so easily.  He’s off his game, tired and with a sore wrist in addition to all his actual injuries, but at least he was coordinated enough to shave this morning, which usually isn’t the case when Aliya is here.  On the other hand, he doesn’t feel satisfied, just fucked out.  Sore and shaky.  “I’ve been here.”

“Great, so you haven’t eaten.  Let’s go get breakfast, I have a job I need help with.”

 

Breakfast turns out to be Mexican food from a street cart.  Nathan contemplates being disapproving, but he’s never eaten cheese before and it’s fucking good.  Also, it takes a lot of calories to run his body and fight his virus at the same time, and he’s taken in almost none since he found his dead wife holding his dead daughter in their home, with the exception of the protein bars that he brought with him.  This definitely qualifies as a lot of calories.

Wade peels up the bottom half of his mask to eat, smearing the lipstick that’s still on it everywhere, and says “boo” when a teenage boy stares at him. “ — anyway,” Wade finishes explaining, “I was thinking I could use a little extra firepower, and all my usual sidekicks have kind of decided I’m a bad bet if they want to live because of all that dying I did at the beginning of my movie, during my blue phase, otherwise known as suicidal depression.  I’d include the hotline number in this bulletin but I don’t know if that’s too flippant for a serious issue.”

“I will help you, Mr. Pool,” Dopinder says.  Nathan wonders if everyone in Wade’s life tunes him out during his spells of incoherence.  Then he contemplates ordering more food, but decides to take it easy on the processed crap after all the shit he’s done to his body already this week.  “I have gotten my cab repaired and I am ready to kick more asses.”

Reaching out to cup the cabbie’s skinny brown face with his gloved hand, Wade leans across the gap between them to lay a kiss on his forehead like a benediction, leaving a tiny bit of lettuce that had been hanging from his lips dangling from the kid’s eyebrow.  “I was never going to leave you behind, you bloodthirsty little minx.”

“I’m here to fix the world before you skullfuck it bloody,” Nathan tells him, interrupting the tableau.  “I’m not playing happy families with you.”

“If anyone is wondering where the kid is right about now,” Wade says, to no one in particular, looking off somewhere to his left, “He’s back at the X-Mansion.  Sure, we’re pawning him off in a pretty ham-handed way so we can get to that good E-rated shit easier, but he’ll be back if he makes it out of the Danger Room.  Besides, you can’t take a fourteen-year-old murdering with you or you’ll get reported to the ASPCA.”

Nathan looks at Dopinder, who is focused on his burrito like he can’t hear this.

Wade turns back to them. “Don’t worry, I came with an ulterior motive prepared so you’ll have an excuse to say yes to spending time with me.  You want to get anything done around here, you’re going to need documentation.  Not that ICE will get on your back, since you look like you’re one bad undercut away from voting for Trump, but the TSA… those guys are for real.  How are you going to fix the Middle East if you can’t even get there?  Scratch that, you and I have no business in the Middle East.  We don’t know anything about it.”

“I’m guessing you know a guy, and you’re about to try to trade his name for my help.”

“Bingo,” Wade says cheerfully.  “Anyway, even with all the hot and heavy research you probably did in your little cave for the last few days, you probably don’t have a list together yet of more children to murder.”

Making fun of him for spending two days holed up in a shittastic motel room with his hand shoved up himself like he had a choice makes Nathan fantasize about ramming the plastic fork he’s holding through Wade’s eye socket, but someone has to be the adult.  “Get off your fucking high horse and look at how many children your country is murdering.”

“I’m Canadian.”

“So?”

“You’re right, all of Western civilization is corrupt.  Anyway, are you coming?  You look like shit.  You’ve got to get your murder fix in, withdrawal looks horrible on you.  Like you did too much cocaine to sleep last night.  I know the feeling.”

Nathan stares at him.  He’s down to a few hundred after he backs out paying for the room, and while he can definitely find someone who isn’t Wade’s guy on the internet, a few hundred is probably not enough to get something that will hold up for the rest of his life. He could steal some more shit — and he’s _going_ to sell the truck — but in the case of whoever Wade actually does deem worthy of death, given that he stopped short of pre-genocidal maniac, it’s probably less morally bankrupt to kill them than it is to take some barely-middle-class hick motherfucker’s stuff.  “Fine. For an even third.”

“Even quarter,” Wade corrects him.  “Domino’s coming.  We’re getting the band back together.”

Nathan sticks out his hand, and immediately regrets it when Wade’s glove leaves a grease stain behind on the metal.

 

Domino meets them at the bar, wearing head to toe leather with her hair tied back in a bandana.  “What happened to your mask?” she asks Wade.

“Sight gag,” he replies.  “Not as effective in written medium as you’d hope.  Weasel, the back room?”

“We’re not even open yet,” Weasel complains, then starts when he sees Nathan.  The fear on his face is gratifying, and Nathan doesn’t manage to suppress his smirk at seeing it.  “Wade, why did you bring the killbot who tortured me back to my bar?”

“I barely fucking touched you,” Nathan says.  “And you probably jacked off to it afterwards, if the state I left you in was any indication.”

Wade gasps. “Fear boner?”

“Back room,” Domino interrupts loudly, and leads the way like she knows the way, although it’s probably just a lucky guess.  Nathan makes sure to loom a little when he brushes past Weasel, who looks like he’s working on another stiffy.  “You look like shit,” she says to him as Wade piles into the room behind him, taking a seat on the desk as he drops into one of the chairs behind it.  “First heat alone for a while?”

Nathan just grunts at her, although he appreciates the bluntness even if it does come wrapped in twenty-first century slang.  Wade, heading for the front of the room and a little bulletin board that has crayon scribbles pinned all over it, freezes in his tracks at the words and then whips around, pulling off his mask and taking a deep breath of the air.

“Holy shit,” he says, looking like someone has clocked him in the face with a frying pan, which is incidentally something Nathan now wants to do.

“Are you serious?” Domino asks him, throwing her hands up in the air.

Dopinder, hands flitting nervously between hanging at his sides and digging into his pockets, cocks his head to the side.  Nathan isn’t exactly visually catering to someone who can’t scent what they are, and has to rely on other, more stereotypical markers — he is, physically, just _larger_ than both Wade and Domino, and about as dainty as a brick to the head, and he hadn’t bothered and doesn’t plan to bother trying to conform his clothing to the fashion of the day — so it’s no surprise someone Null doesn’t know what’s going on.  “What is it?”

“Our fearless leader here _just_ figured out Cable’s an omega.”

“Don’t call me that,” Nathan grumbles.  Archaic fucking designations.  “Can you not smell anything but your own cuntbreath in that fucking mask?”

“I actually can’t,” Wade answers, still looking thunderstruck. “But I’ve definitely had it off around you _several_ times, so _that’s_ a plot hole I’m sure will get sloppily plastered over whenever the author comes up with a good excuse.  In my defense, you do look like you came off the cover of Goth Apocalypse Playgirl’s Alpha Daddy of the Month calendar.”

“You don’t really scent very much, and being bonded does kind of make him less obvious,” Domino says, shrugging.  “You’re still an idiot, though.”

Wade snorts, and looks off to his left again. “ _Someone’s_ reaching.”

 “Are we going to move on from what’s in my fucking pants anytime soon?”

“Not until what’s in _my_ pants calms down,” Wade says, but it sounds more reflexive than anything.  Nathan looks directly at his crotch, and he’s not hard.  “ _Okay_ , it’s calm right now, but it’s not going to be for long if you keep looking at it like you want to bite it off, baby.”

Domino turns to Nathan.  “I bet you’re regretting not being home right now.”

In certain ways, he does.  He misses his wife and daughter like he thinks he’d miss an internal organ, and he could do without the fact that Wade appears to be trying to annoy him into a fight.  But he’s had time to think about it, and the world clearly needs someone with a moral compass that looks like Wade Wilson’s, even if he’s a crazy motherfucker who will never do anything as good as keeping Nathan from killing Russell Collins again.  He grunts again instead of admitting that he thinks there’s a spark of potential for greatness buried amongst all the jokes about fucking and references to bad movies.

“Who is it we are killing?” Dopinder says.  Nathan can see a hint of ruthless assassin in the way he proverbially shoots the conversation in the head in a back alley, and jerks his chin at him in acknowledgement, although the gesture appears to go unrecognized.

Wade snaps out the reverie of probably imagining Nathan biting his dick off.  Mercifully, his brain is a sparking wall of gibberish in the sight of his telepathy, and he can’t tell if his intuition is right or not.  “Oh, like, a _bunch_ of people.  We’ve got a whole list.”

“Someone gave you a list?” Domino asks.  “Who?”

“Yeah.  Nice lady.  Looks like someone burned her face off and she replaced it with Phantom of the Opera cosplay, wouldn’t give me her name.  I asked if she was Cable’s wife, but she said no.  Anyway, I did some research, they’re all a bunch of assholes.”  With a resounding _thunk_ , Wade knifes a piece of paper into the wall.  “Totally deserve it.”

“Goddamn it,” Weasel swears from the back of the room.  “I _just_ had all the holes patched.”

“Oh, no,” Dopinder says, quiet and despairing.  “I just patched all the holes.”

Nathan has gotten out of his chair to look at the paper.  The type is small and square. “I don’t like this,” he says, after a minute.  The first name sounds semi-familiar, and the third he knows absolutely, so he stalks back to the desk and pries off the back of the ancient, boxy computer to stick his T-O hand into the wires.  He can parse the internet faster than it can, but he needs its connection to run.

“Oh, goddamn it,” Weasel repeats.  “Wade, I hate this guy.”

The room fills with orange light as Nathan does his research.

“Okay, that’s cool,” Weasel amends.

“Um, guys?”  Domino says, now reading the paper herself.  “I’m on this list.”

“So is Theresa Cassidy,” Nathan adds, projecting images as he goes, “Tabitha Smith, Samuel Guthrie, and Danielle Moonstar.  Mostly mutants, possibly all mutants, since some of those four are too young to manifest.  I would have thought that would put you off after all the bitching.”

Unconcernedly, Wade peers at the list, then at Domino.  “So does that make you Neena Thurman or Nathan Summers?  No judgement.”

“Neena Thurman,” Domino replies.

“ _I’m_ Nathan Summers,” Nathan says.

Everyone turns to him.  “Wow, I could get through a third of this list in under a minute,” Wade says, looking completely unperturbed.  “Square up, assholes.”

Domino and Nathan look at each other, then at him, neither particularly impressed.

“You so much as twitch for those swords and you’ll be growing your diseased balls back every thirty seconds for the rest of your miserable goddamned life,” he threatens, at the same time Domino says, “I didn’t know you could do math.”

Wade starts laughing.  It looks like a full-body convulsion and sounds like a villain out of a cartoon.  “Oh, the looks on your faces.”

“Mr. Pool, I would not like to kill them,” Dopinder says, sounding apologetic, which is brave of him, considering the fact that Nathan could break his spine over his knee like a fucking twig.

“I have a strict no-killing policy in the bar,” Weasel says.  “I’m tired of making Dopinder clean blood out of the floorboards.”

“No one is killing anyone,” Wade assures everyone.  “Well, eventually.  First we have to find her, though.  No name and only an email address for contact.  Already checked it, in case anyone is wondering.  I mean, we’ve all read the X-Force runs, so sharp eyes will already know who we’re after, but that doesn’t help with finding her.”

“Timeslider,” Nathan cuts in, then revises.  “Or precog.  I haven’t been born yet, and I’ve only been here a few days, so if my name is on that list, it has to be one of those things.”

“Let’s hope it’s the first one,” Domino says.  “I have a feeling the second one wouldn’t mix well with my mojo.”

“I think we’re _all_ timesliding way too fast over the fact that _his_ name is Nathan,” Weasel interrupts, pointing at him.  “ _Nathan_.  That’s like if his name was Kyle.  Or Bradley.  Or Josh.”

“Wait until you hear all his middle names, Weas,” Wade says.  “Also, in a way, his name _is_ Josh.”

The weirdest part about all the weird shit that comes out of that perpetual motion machine Wade calls a mouth is that sometimes there’s a grain of truth in it, and it’s usually a truth he shouldn’t know anything about, like the fact that Nathan has more than one middle name.  He crosses his arms over his chest and shuts off the projection, then probes Wade’s mind for any hint of telepathy and gets jack shit nothing other than more blithering nonsense.

“Hey, can you get porn on that thing?” Wade asks.

Rolling his eyes, Nathan ignores him.  “We should start with a name.”

“I could throw darts at phone books,” Domino offers.

“You people still have phone books?”

“Maybe the random article button on Wikipedia?”

Dopinder raises his hand.  “What if she does not have a Wikipedia page?”

“Then I’ll probably learn something new. Last time I ended up getting into heavy metal.”

“Great,” Wade says.  “You two, Internet Explore.  I’m going to go shake my money-maker.  Dopinder, you’re with me.”

“He just pawned that off on us so he didn’t have to do it, didn’t he,” says Domino after they leave.  Weasel is still lurking in the back of the room, but after Nathan comes out of the back of the computer with a fistful of wires and gives him a look, he scurries.  “You can fix that, right?”

“I could rebuild this computer in my sleep,” Nathan tells her, restarting the display and beginning a refined search for the names on the list.  “It’s primitive.”

“Good, I hate reading Wikipedia on my phone.”

“I don’t think this piece of shit could handle me making it do this and that at once.”

“Phone it is.  How can you tell someone is a mutant from the internet?”

Nathan pulls together a file about her from everything that exists in every networked database on earth, finds the letter “A” next to secondary sex in her file from the Essex School, projects it, and points to it.  “That.”

Domino purses her lips. “I could swear I know non-mutants with secondary sexes.  Maybe vice versa, too.”

“The inversion in the sex chromosomes was connected to the presence of the x-gene in the late seventies,” Nathan says, puzzled.  “It’s in Charles Xavier’s research.  He hypothesized the increased fertility contributed to the x-gene’s dominance and increasingly high rate of inheritance.  I thought that would be common knowledge by now.”

“That seems like the kind of information someone who wanted mutants to be able to hide would probably sit on.”  She returns to her phone.  “Okay, the first article is Mother Teresa, so that’s not helpful.”

“Theresa was one of the names on the list.”

“The next one is a Swedish company.  ‘Publicly listed provider of networking solutions.’  Sounds fake.”

“Think that fucking pussy behind the bar’s got a phone book?”

 

A week later, Theresa Cassidy is still their one and only breath of a lead, and it evaporates basically the second they go to see her.  “Hey, honey, have you seen anyone who looks like they fell face-first into a bonfire lately?”  Wade asks her, with his mask on to cut off the inevitable _other than you_ response.

She’s twelve, though, so maybe she wouldn’t be mean enough to say that.  Nathan’s mean enough to think it, though, although actually Wade’s skin doesn’t look much like he’s been burned, the flesh melted somewhat similarly into a waxy shell but not heat-dark. “Did you really think that was going to work?” he asks, when Wade comes skipping back over to him.

“Maybe it would have if you hadn’t killed her uncle,” Wade replies, although they both know she doesn’t know that.  Nathan hadn’t even known it until he’d given a file with his research in it to Wade and the name Black Tom Cassidy had drawn a gasp.  He doesn’t really remember shooting him, but he believes it happened.  “I probably should have mentioned that you came to kill _other_ kids and members of her family, not her.”

“Are you ever going to let that go?”

“Apologize to the hefty teenager I spend my weekends with and I’ll think about it.”  Nathan can hear the grin from under his mask, but it doesn’t take the edge off the words.  It makes him respect Wade more, he realizes, that he’s stubborn about this issue, even if it makes his life exponentially more annoying.  He doesn’t exactly feel remorseful for trying to wipe Russell out of the timeline, but it’s possible Wade has managed to beat it into him that next time, he should think through his other options.  “You hurt his feelings with all those attempts to murder him and let’s be real, fishing around in his ass for that pen had already traumatized him enough.”

“You know he’s not your actual kid.”

“Sure.”  Wade shrugs.  “But it’s this or I adopt fifty-two cats, and Al would kill me if I moved fifty-two cats into her place.  Although fifty-two cats would be a lot harder for you to murder out from under me, so I guess there are some benefits to that idea.”

“You really are like Aliya,” he says, without thinking about it.  It was the first thing he liked about her, her tendency to tell him when he’s being a piece of shit.  There are plenty of people who won’t even breathe in his direction, where he’s from, but she was always honest, even when he hadn’t particularly wanted her to be.  She wouldn’t wrap her disapproval in jokes, like Wade, but she wouldn’t keep it to herself, either.

“If you keep telling me I’m like your alpha I’m going to get ideas,” Wade tells him.  “But good work on not getting out the chapstick.  Next time we eliminate the eye contact.”

Nathan snorts.  “Don’t call her that.”

“Until you tell us all what you want us to say instead, quit bitching, Duck Rogers.  What’s the problem, anyway?  Did we collectively lose our boner for Greece by the twenty-fourth and a half century?  Because that seems unlikely.  I mean, just look at science fiction.  The Lords of Kobol and every vaguely sinister military organization that has a mission called Project Artemis or Project Cerberus beg to differ.”

“Everyone in this time can shove their ‘first and the last’ religious masturbation up their asses,” Nathan says.  “And evolutionarily, it’s not a step backward towards animals, it’s a step forward towards something else.  You’re not some kind of fancy fucking wolf pack leader because you have a special dick, you’re a mutant.”

“I’m flattered that you think it’s special.  Anyway, it’s a word, not a commentary on your manhood.  Ness was _my_ alpha and you don’t see my special dick shriveling up.  Actually, I tried to get it tattooed on my ass a couple of times, but that shit just doesn’t stick like it used to.”

That is, if not unique, a rare thing to hear.  Although Wade probably doesn’t realize the sort of base submission he’d be laying claim to if he said those words where Nathan comes from, it isn’t exactly a gesture of power and control here, either, particularly not coming from another — to use his parlance — alpha.  Wade is showing not only his throat, but his belly, defenseless.  He shakes his head, and relents, once again bowled over by Wade Wilson.  “Break.”

“What?”

“Break,” Nathan repeats.  “You asked what I wanted you to say instead.  Or you can just call her my wife.  Or Aliya.”

“I’m sorry, your Break?  That sounds ridiculous.  As in the break room?  The brake pad?  Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar?”

“As in the inversion and insertion of genetic material that makes you tick makes your sex chromosome look broken when karyotyped.”  He demonstrates with a finger, but it has the added side effect of looking like a wilting erection, which makes Wade snicker.

“The drugs they make for that don’t work on me these days, so I’m going to stick with my word.”  Wade claps him on his flesh shoulder, getting dangerously close to his claiming mark.  “Also, wolves are way cooler than chromosomes.”

“Call yourself whatever you want.”  He pauses.  “But it’s degrading dirty talk in my time, so keep it out of your mouth when you’re talking about my wife.”

“What, seriously?  Wait, am I going to turn you on if I keep saying it?  Damn my animal magnetism.”

Nathan contemplates spitting out the emphatic no that rises to his lips, but decides fucking with him is a better bet, so he mirrors the gesture, resting his T-O hand on Wade’s opposite shoulder for a moment and pulling his mouth into a sneering grin.  “I’ll let you know if it gets me too wet, gorgeous.”

He turns away to walk back up the block towards the cab, and suppresses laughter when it takes Wade a minute of choking to follow him.


	2. D5.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all.... i'm very bad at this au. i figure i'll hopefully update tuesday nights, provided my nutso schedule doesn't fuck it up for me. this chapter has some sex in it, but also some plot-related cockblocking, so sorry about one of those things, and also about my general discomfort with this au. this bit honestly could mostly be a non-a/b/o thing, although the next chapter will have more of that shit in it.
> 
> why do i make these two lick each other so much. i just feel like they're both into that

Domino’s version of looking for someone involves walking into train stations and getting on whatever car calls to her.  Deadpool’s version is killing people until he finds somebody who knows something, which is somewhat close to Nathan’s version, but also not terribly effective when you don’t have a name or face to start with.  There are good reasons to have safeguards in place on the back end between the people who contract at Sister Margaret’s and the people who take the contracts, but it’s still infuriating not to have a recourse when it seems like there should be one there.

“DP,” Dopinder asks, “What if you do not finish a job?”

They’re on a rooftop in New York City and Nathan has his gun trained on a window across a vast expanse of open space, filled with honking cars that have no idea they’re up here, eighty stories up.  It’s a regular contract killing, nothing to do with the list and everything to do with the fact that he needs to keep paying fifty dollars a night for his shitty motel room, and close to that again in food and other expenses.  It’s been weeks, and nothing new has emerged on the list, or the woman.  Nagging in the back of his mind is the very real possibility he might have to ask the X-Men for help, a prospect which enthuses him not at all.

“Lesson one, Dopinder,” Wade says, the thousandth ‘lesson one’ Nathan has heard him deal out, although he suspects that if the man can divide two by six, he can probably count. “We _always_ finish a job.”

“But what if we don’t,” Dopinder presses.

“Then we get no money, if we’re lucky, or they try to kill Weasel, if we’re even luckier.”

Nathan is thinking through how the bullet will move when it hits the glass.  He decides since he doesn’t know what kind of glass it is, he’s going to break it with a first shot and take the kill with a second.  If all goes well on the glass-breaking front, the worst thing that happens is some scum-sucking slumlord whose wife wants him out of the way so she can marry her lover has two extra holes in his head instead of just one.

“This would go so much faster if you’d just let me hack and chop my way up there,” Wade says.  Nathan ignores him, which is a surefire way to make him keep talking, but really, he doesn’t mind the talking, most of the time. “I mean, this hasn’t even been a good internship trip for Dopinder.  All we’ve done is sit here and watch you do math.  Who’s going to sign off on his hours?  How’s he going to get his learner’s permit?  You’re not even doing the math out loud.”

“DP, you get a learner’s permit before your hours,” Dopinder says.

“Shh.  Lesson one, sidekicks don’t correct heroes.  Anti-heroes?  It could be either one.  Personally, I think they’re reaching a little too hard for the redemption thing, but what do I know, I just read all the comics.”

Nathan twitches his finger.  Across the street, the glass shatters instead of breaking into pie-shaped chunks, so it isn’t laminated.  His eye glows as he looks through to correct his angle, and he squeezes off another shot, which does the job, if the faint spray of brain matter that goes up is anything to go on.  Commotion will begin on the street soon, he thinks, as people who couldn’t see the window breaking in the dark notice the shards of falling glass.  “First,” he says, rising from his position and clipping his gun back onto his back, “We should go.  Second, I’m not cutting you in. Third, I think the kid has a point.”

Dopinder looks at him like he’s grown a second head.  “I do?”

Wade hops up, dusts off the front of his suit where he’s been lying on the concrete lip overhanging the drop hundreds of feet into the street, and flips off the ledge onto the roof, like the peacock he is, bowing when he sticks the landing. “Yeah, he’s right about the learner’s permit.”

“She have any idea who you are?”

Wade tilts his head to the side, like a dog listening.  As usual, his face is hidden, but Nathan has been spending enough time with him that he knows the silhouette of him starting all the gears in his head running, faster than somebody who acts like such an idiot should be able to think.  It’s about the only time he’s ever quiet, which is all well and good, but they still should get going.

When they get to the ground floor, Dopinder panting and Wade patting him on the back, he finally speaks. “Weasel told me to take the mask off in solidarity before he sent me to see her, so she hasn’t seen me all suited up, but she could probably find me.  Not many can achieve these good looks through willpower alone.  Also, she has my phone number.  One of my phone numbers.  Perks of offering a cool seven million for a job.”

“Then you’re the bait,” Nathan says.  “Been more than a month.  You haven’t killed anybody on the list.  Shouldn’t take too long.”

As soon as they’re safely in the cab and driving away, he reaches a hand over the front seat to palm the chest of Wade’s suit. There’s definitely shit shoved in there, including what feels like a bra cup, but not what he’s looking for.  “Woah, there, Uncle Joe,” Wade protests. “What will Barack say?”

“Where’s your phone,” Nathan asks, holding out his palm.

Wade digs it out, and holds it in front of him, over the dashboard and just out of Nathan’s reach, unless he breaks Wade’s elbow or rolls into the front of the car.  “Are you going to destroy it?  Because I keep all my good dick pics on there.  Filters, framing, the works.  Plus, my sex tapes.  I can’t have you Rob Lowe-ing me.”

Nathan peels a little of his TK off the edge of the nano-machinery eating his body and pulls the phone into his hand, ignoring that.  “Yeah, I’m gonna destroy it,” he says, and jerks out the fastener holding the back on with the TK, too, since he’s not going to fuck around with screwdrivers right now.  “Give me the charge cord or it’ll wipe, too.”

Dopinder hands him the cord.  Wade has gone still, like a prey animal.

What Nathan does to electronics puts a lot of strain on the weak tech of this time period, but it’s less if he doesn’t project, just sees it through his connection, so he presses his thumb to the machinery of the phone and accesses the data network quietly, running through news stories over the last month, and then specific name-searches.  “They’re all still alive,” Nathan tells him, after about ten minutes of scouring, and slots the back into place, drives the fastener together again.  He turns over the phone in his palm. The lock screen is a picture of Colossus’ ass, blurry and close-up, and the battery is now at four percent.  He rolls his eyes and hands it back.  “We should keep an eye on that, in case she decides to find a better assassin instead of waiting on you.”

Wade is still quiet, doing something with the phone.  It’s a little disconcerting.

“I left all your dick pics intact,” Nathan adds.

“Mmhmm,” Wade says, but then, after a few moments, he sees whatever he wants to see and his shoulders relax a little.  He puts the phone away.  “If you wanted to see my dick you could have just asked.  It’s right here, baby.  Just a teeny bit of spandex, leather, and my fancy killing panties in the way.”

“I’ve seen it before.  It was underwhelming.”

He looks at the rearview mirror and sees Dopinder looking pained.  That doesn’t stop Wade, who can surely also see the expression, from turning around and pointing one gloved finger sternly at Nathan.  “ _You_ already said my dick was special. You can’t take that back now, He-man.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’ll remember that moment forever, you horny fuckwit.”

“It’s featured in most of my wet dreams since then,” Wade says, turning back around.  Nathan takes a quick peek inside Dopinder’s brain and comes away with high-pitched screaming. He only barely doesn’t laugh, and decides to be merciful and not perpetuate the obscene banter.

Suddenly, he realizes that it really can’t be mistaken for anything but heavy-handed flirting.  This is not at all surprising on Wade’s part — he puts on a good show of being ready to fuck anything that moves, and a few things that don’t — but it feels out of character for himself to have fallen into it so quickly, too.  “Jesus Christ,” he mutters, and Wade snorts, probably thinking it’s for him, which in a way it is.

It objectively makes a lot of sense.  Wade is exactly his type, insofar as he’s fucking funny as hell and so sharp you could cut yourself on him.  Also objectively, of course, he’s crazier than a bag of cats, but that makes startlingly little difference to Nathan’s regard for him.

Aliya wouldn’t be upset.  She knows, always, that he loves her.  She would probably be confused, though.  Wade’s ridiculous.  He’s ugly.  He’s got Golden Girls trivia where his sense of shame and self-preservation should go.  And Nathan doesn’t treat him like he treated her — too mean, not affectionate enough.  She probably couldn’t recognize the shape of this inexplicable attraction.  He’s not really sure he can recognize it, either.

 

When they walk into the bar, dingy and crowded at this time of night, Domino waves from a table in the back.  He had been going to go back to the motel and to bed after cashing out, but she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t need to talk to them.  Nathan thinks about buying a drink for everyone but Wade, but decides that’s too much like pulling pigtails for his taste, and orders four beers with the money from the job.

Wade promptly drops a shot of whiskey into his, says, “Boilermaker!” and orders a cosmo.  As far as Nathan can tell, he can’t get drunk, but he still insists on putting it away like his girlfriend just dumped him on Valentine’s Day.

Domino accepts hers with a nod.

“You can leave now,” she tells the man sitting across from her, who must have slid in in the time it took the three of them to get drinks.  He looks like he probably does some work for Weasel, muscled arms bare because the sleeves have been ripped off his shirt, leer cigarette-stained and crooked-toothed.  Nathan breathes in, smells sweat and Null and what’s probably the remnants of alcoholic vomit left behind on the guy’s breath.  The guy, not knowing that she’s probably stronger than him and has much sharper teeth, looks disdainful of the order for a half second until he glances up and sees Nathan, who is taller than him by more than half a foot and outweighs him by possibly two hundred pounds, then looks behind him and sees Wade, who looks intimidatingly murderous even when he doesn’t have weapons strapped to every inch of him.  His eyes widen slightly, and he scrambles like a rat.

“Good boy,” Nathan says scornfully to his retreating back, sliding into the seat next to Domino.  “So what is it?”

She reaches onto the bench on the other side of her and lays a length of black cloth across the table.

“Hey,” says Wade. “That’s your fanny pack.”

Nathan reaches out and picks it up.  It’s not.  He’s still wearing his.  But it looks just like it.  The fabric isn’t modern.  It’s Askani-made.  It looks older, more worn than the one he’s wearing, and the strap is sliced raggedly in half, but otherwise — the same.  “Huh.”

“Oh, and this,” Domino says, and puts a circular cuff of metal down on the table.  “I found it yesterday about twenty feet away from the bag.  Practically tripped over it.”

Nathan severely doubts she’s ever tripped on anything.  He picks up the device and almost drops it upon examining it closer, overcome with shock.  “This is — ”  His brow wrinkles.  “I _made_ this.”

The metals are shit, although they’re probably better than anything he could get his hands on at this very minute, if he tried.  It looks crude, by his standards, larger than it needs to be, with a display and interface that would have made his teachers scold him for hackwork.  But he recognizes his own handiwork, even when it’s clearly done in less-than-ideal conditions, like being stuck in the past away from the usual materials he would use to make it.

“What is it?” Dopinder asks, finally, breaking his trance.

“It’s a… teleportation matrix.”  Saying ‘bodyslide device’ would only confuse them.

“You mean we just spent three hours in a car when you can _teleport_?” Wade says.  “I call foul. Don’t use it, though, depending on when and where it’s from you might just bodyslide us into the same body.”

Nathan looks at him, perplexed.  Maybe the term comes from some piece of media he’s not aware of.  Maybe it’s already in use, except he doesn’t think that bodysliding is possible, yet.  As usual, he comes up with nothing to explain the fact of Wade Wilson’s existence but static inside his bumpy, fucked-up skull and the mitigating factor of mild to severe insanity.  “Sometimes I think I’m hallucinating you.”

Wade grins.  “That’s so sweet.  All _my_ hallucinations are mean to me.”

“Why would she leave it behind?” Domino asks, cutting between them.

“It wouldn’t work for someone without my DNA. Where was this?”  Nathan turns back to her, his beer forgotten.

“Under a bridge in D.C..  I had a feeling about it, and then I saw your bag.”

Nathan puts the bodyslide device inside his own bag and picks up the bag on the table again, examining it closely.  The cloth is stronger than any textile manufactured on earth in this time, but it still shows the wear of age a little, a few carefully-trimmed stray threads and fading color, slightly salt-bleached where it lies against his shirt.  “It might not be mine.”

“It looks just like yours and I found it next to something that _is_ yours.”

She has a point.

“Why not look inside it?” Dopinder suggests.

“Do the lip balm pocket first so we know you’re honest,” Wade chimes in.

Nathan rolls his eyes, and pulls out a tube of chapstick from the bag on the table.  He does his best to feel surprised that it’s there, but is mostly just pleased to discover that bees survive long enough into whenever this bag came back from for the tube to have SUSTAINABLY SOURCED BEESWAX printed on the side.

“ _Confirmed_ ,” Wade says, and gasps.  “Are you the burn victim?  Did you come back in time to kill more kids?  Your thirst for child blood only grows with the years.”

“It’s a woman, dickstain,” Nathan tells him.  “But it looks like she’s timesliding with my gear.”  He unzips another pocket, finds a tiny set of tools, and recognizes a nick in the metal on one of them, a product of fishing around in his arm for a pebble Hope had dropped into it as a toddler.  “ _This_ is definitely mine,” he says, digging out his own and holding them up next to each other for comparison.

He puts them on the table and reaches for the next pocket, where he keeps spare bullets and protein bars.  They’re there, all right, but there’s a scrap of lacy red fabric crumpled on top of them.  He pulls it out, and it unfolds into a pair of some of the skimpiest lingerie he’s ever seen, which is admittedly not saying much because lingerie isn’t really something people of his era waste time with.

Silence rules the table for a second, as the panties swing from his fingers.

Domino snorts.  “If no one else is going to say it — you always travel with those, Cable?”

“No,” Nathan says.  He looks up at Wade, who is uncharacteristically late with whatever joke he’s going to make, but he’s just looking at the cloth in Nathan’s hand with an inscrutable expression.  “They’re not mine.”

She laughs. “Yeah, that’s not your color.”

Nathan blinks at them for a second, then brings them to his face and breathes in the smell off the waistband, ignoring the squawk Dopinder makes.  Stale sweat, Break.  Leather and salt.  Abruptly, he’s sure of whose color it is. His eyes flash up across the table to Wade, who, in the midst of swallowing so hard his Adam’s apple looks like it’s convulsing, isn’t looking at him.

“Good god, man,” Weasel says, appearing at the tableside from nowhere with a round of shots.  Nathan moves his hand away from his face and looks up at him, internally bemoaning the fact that most of the frightened respect from the near-miss torture session has worn off. “Keep your kinks to yourself.  Next thing we know you’ll be wearing a fursuit in here or some shit.”

Nathan puts the panties back in the pocket, and buttons it.  Wade continues to avoid his eyes, but laughs at him anyway.  “Look at him, Weas, you know it’ll be bondage gear.  He’s got that ‘Daddy dom you just can’t please’ vibe going on.  Give him a riding crop and half the bar would be crawling to lick his boots.”

“Bright lady,” Nathan sighs, shaking his head, and ties the ends of the new utility bag together so he can hang it over his shoulder, then downs his beer, which he had barely started on before Domino had dropped her bombshells.  He doesn’t feel like he was ever going to be ready for the realization that in the future, he’s the kind of person who carries Wade’s lace underwear with him into battle.  “If that’s all, I’m going home.”

“You’re going back to a sleazy motel with somebody’s used panties to sniff,” Weasel corrects him.  Wade twitches, shifts restlessly in his seat, dropping an inch lower like he’s shoving his bottom half under the table.  “Don’t call it home, it just makes it a thousand times sadder.”

Nathan slowly stands up to his full height, holding eye contact the whole time, and invades his personal space, going chest to chest with him.  He maintains the stare for about twenty seconds, in which the bar goes silent around them, waiting for an attack, then smiles, knowing he looks wolfish. “I can feel your boner, genius.  _That’s_ sad.”

Wade starts laughing hysterically as he walks away, leaving Weasel to scurry back behind the bar, looking aggrieved.

As soon as he’s out the door, he digs out the bodyslide device, then thinks better of it.  He wants to know where it’s programmed to return him to, but it’s a better idea to wait until he’s slept and it’s light outside, at least on this coast, in case he has to find his way back from somewhere.  He hasn’t bothered to note coordinates for anywhere, and doesn’t want to have to guess about them on the fly.  Although he’s sure he wouldn’t have built something that would bodyslide him into a solid structure, he has no idea where “home” is for this device.  It could be over open water that has yet to be paved over, or the middle of a battlefield in a war that hasn’t ended, or thousands of feet in the air, where a skyscraper hasn’t been built.

The motel is still shit.  A temporary solution to a permanent problem, Aliya would probably say, and it’s beginning to grate.  He’d thought he’d be out of this city by now, when he’d rented the room, not to mention too grief-mad to give a shit about long-term plans, anyway.  Instead, it’s beginning to look like he should have signed the lease on a fucking apartment.  It’d be cheaper, and it’d feel less like this timeline isn’t real, sometimes.

Sitting on the edge of the ratty bed, Nathan pulls the panties out again, holding them between his T-O fingers, where they look even more delicate.  Pretty, even.  Incongruous with Wade, who is the dictionary definition of indelicate, and whose picture could not possibly illustrate any word that is even in the vicinity of meaning pretty.  _Something to remember you by_ , he remembers saying when he took that token.  He wonders if he’d say it again, tucking these into his bag, with a grin on his face.

Aliya would never be caught dead wearing something like this.  She’d think it was frivolous, and hedonistic, and he doesn’t disagree.  The thought of her in them doesn’t stir him.  On the other hand, it makes his pulse jump slightly to think of Wade in them.  Of himself, taking them off him.  He misses his wife with a new deep ache, suddenly, because she’s the only person he wants to talk to about this.  No one here has known him longer than five weeks.  If he started telling any of them about his _feelings_ they’d check him for a head injury.

He hooks the panties over the bedpost and scrubs his hands over his face.

“Jesus Christ,” he says again, to no one.

 

“So we definitely fuck in the future,” Wade tells him conversationally while they’re in the bar a few days later, waiting for Domino, even though there’s nothing really new to say, it’s just how Wednesday nights go, now.  He’s got a baseball cap with a bright pink Playboy bunny logo stitched into it pulled low over his eyes, and there’s smoke ringing his face, so it’s hard to tell what expression he’s asking it with, even without the mask.  “Right?”

Nathan lowers his beer from his mouth to give him the full effect of the flat look he levels at him.  “Unless you think I’m raiding your panty drawer in my off hours, dickhole.”

Wade snorts, and takes another hit.  “Wow, I must _really_ remind you of your wife.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Yeah.  I’m wearing them.”

Nathan blinks stupidly at him for a second, but the answer is already jolting its electric way down his spine before the question even trips out of his mouth.  “Wearing what?”

“ _My grandmother’s wedding garters_ , Rose,” Wade says, and then Domino slides onto the stool next to him, leaving Nathan’s next words dying on his tongue as she immediately puts the conversation in drive and pumps the gas.

“So, I’ve been thinking.  Do you think we should put the kids somewhere safe while we’re trying to provoke the psycho who put a bounty on their heads?”

“Well, if we’re lucky, she’ll just call me to complain,” Wade says, and then pauses long enough that the smoke clears, looking expectantly at his phone and shaking it in her direction when it doesn’t ring.  “I fucking knew your power was fake.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Domino informs him blithely.  “Anyway, the kids?”

Nathan yanks his mind out of the gutter Wade had brutally curbstomped it into, shakes his head to clear it of red lace.  “We’re going to have to talk to the X-Men.”

Wade perks up.

“Not you,” Nathan warns him, holding up a finger.  If Wade goes, he’ll alienate everyone there and probably get himself credibly accused of kidnapping.  Even with Colossus to defend him — _assuming_ he’ll defend him — it probably won’t go well.  “I’ll go.”

“I love it when you get stern with me, Daddy.”

“What the fuck did I say about kinks in the bar?” Weasel complains, emerging from the back room with a stack of little cards to slide under the register.  “Especially that one.  It’s gross.”

Nathan looks at him and bites back the words _Go away, Daddy’s working_.

Wade grins like he knows what he’s thinking, teeth flashing in the shadow of the hat, and blows a cloud of smoke into Weasel’s face.  In the shitty lighting, Nathan can see the silhouette of his features without the distraction of the pitting and mess.  He was probably handsome once.  Strong jaw.  Good cheekbones. Nathan knows a lot about Wade, has done his research, but he doesn’t know how he got this way, and he’s stayed away from pictures of how he was before.  He doesn’t really want to know.  It feels unfair, somehow, to know.

Weasel rolls his eyes.  “This isn’t Colorado, asshole.  You have to share if you’re smoking in here.”

“Where is it?” Wade asks, handing over the blunt without protest.  “Albany?  Syracuse?  Poughkeepsie? I assume it can’t be New York City or I’d have gotten to kiss Spider-man by now.  The old divorced version with the beer gut, obviously, not the teenager.  I’m gross, but I’m not that gross.  Maybe the cartoon pig.  Maybe it’s Metropolis.”

Domino quirks her head at him.  “Do you not know where you live?”

“Miami?  Do you?”

“Yes?”

Four beers in, Wade scrambles over the bar to make his own drink, and his shirt rides up enough that Nathan catches a flash of red.  Instead of another nauseating shock of arousal, the buzz he’s got on turns it into a hot spark in the pit of his stomach, and when he opens his eyes again and looks up, Wade is making direct eye contact.

The fucker.

“Hey, Nate, you want a blowjob?”

Domino starts laughing at the look on his face, and then gets up and leaves, clapping him on the back.  “Good luck.”

“I feel like it’s weird when she says stuff like that,” Wade says contemplatively as she walks out the door, throwing a wave to Weasel as she goes.  “Like a curse.”

Nathan takes a deep breath through his nose.  Past the smell of smoke and piss and spilled alcohol, he can make out Wade, or he thinks he can, probably only due to familiarity, and he holds the scent in his lungs for a second before he speaks.  “So am I going to get that blowjob or not.”

Wade puts a shot down in front of him, then sprays whipped cream on the top of it.  Nathan looks at it for a second, then picks it up, and, looking directly at him, licks the whipped cream off it before he downs it.

“Tastes like shit.”

“You _know_ that’s not how you’re supposed to do them,” Wade says, accusatory.

Last chance to hit the bullseye, Nathan decides, and then he’s going home and forgetting about this shit, or possibly masturbating to it.  Definitely masturbating to it at some point, really, just a question of when, and how fucking annoyed he’s going to be with himself when he does it.  “So show me how it’s done, pretty boy.”

Wade doesn’t even bat an eye, just puts another shot on the counter, sprays whipped cream into it, then fixes his mouth around the rim, hands twisted together behind his back, and empties the glass down his throat.  Well, it’s a choice.  To be frank, it’s not the choice Nathan had expected or hoped that he would make, but Wade is always a surprise, and not always a good one, and he’s not sure he’d change either of those things about him, although it would be nice to feel that things are going his way for once.

Nathan reaches over the bar to tuck a twenty into the collar of his shirt, pats his chest, and then says, “Good night.”

He feels hands on his hips before he even hits the street, and Wade ducks under his arm like they’re dancing, slides around in front of him, and crowds him into the brick wall of the building.  “I’m going to blow you now,” he announces, pausing a moment for effect or rejection before he keeps moving.  He takes his hat off, turns it around backwards, and puts it on Nathan’s head.  Then he drops to his knees.  Into a fucking puddle.  Nathan hears the splash and feels some of it hit his pant legs, and wants to close his eyes in exasperation, but can’t look away, rude words getting stuck in his throat.

Wade doesn’t appear to notice, just fumbles with his belt and then drags his zipper down, reaching inside to get his dick out. “Commando.  Saucy.”

“With what you’ve got on? I’m Sister fucking Margaret.”

Wade laughs, breath hot on Nathan’s still-soft cock, and shoves down the waistband of his pants onto his upper thighs for better access.  He sucks the tip into his mouth for a moment and then lets it rub against his cheekbone, wet head dragging on the imperfections in his skin.  Anyone who walks out of the bar, and most people who could walk into it, or even past it, will be able to see them if they look into the shadows, but Nathan, after an admittedly brief period of consideration, decides not to give a shit.  The hat is shading his face.  He doesn’t really care if they see his dick.

Wade fits his mouth around him, gentle like they’re in a bed with the lights turned off and not a goddamn dive bar back alley next to the dumpster, and then Nathan _actually_ doesn’t give a shit.  It’s been more than two months since the last time he had sex with something that wasn’t one of his hands, which is not long enough to excuse how fast he gets hard, how fast he feels slick between the thighs, hot under the collar, like he’s sweating through his shirt.  Especially not when careful sex has never really been the shit that got him off.

As soon as his cock’s fully in play, he feels teeth, sharp enough to feel dangerous but not hard enough to hurt, as Wade looks up at him, grinning crazily around his mouthful.  Either the suction that follows or the glint of insanity in Wade’s eyes makes Nathan’s voice come out hoarse when he speaks.  “Bite me and I’m going to make your balls wish they’d never dropped.”

Wade pulls off, dragging his tongue up him the whole way, looking filthy and sounding obscene.  “Do you promise?”

Nathan tips his head back against the brick, rubs his T-O hand over his face.  “Jesus.”

“Hey,” Wade says, and then catches Nathan’s right hand in his left so he can pin it to the wall, reaches up to to pull his left down and do the same. “Look, ma, no hands.”

Nathan presses his palms against the brick and tries not to examine the throb of his pulse he can feel in his throat.  When Wade puts his mouth back, it’s less coordinated, looks fucking ridiculous as his cock bobs out of the way when he hits it with his nose, leading to a short chase scene that has no business making a warm, wet line roll a little way down Nathan’s inner thigh.  He makes a pleased noise when he finally catches it and slides back down, mercifully no more teeth but no more gentleness either, cratered cheeks hollow and thin lips sealed tightly around him.

There’s almost no light in the alley, except for the neon sign, but the shadows still give him enough of a picture to get his heart racing, left hand peeling off the wall a little when Wade starts bobbing his head because Wade isn’t strong enough to keep it there.  He claps it back as soon as he realizes, and Wade hums like that’s exactly what he wanted, pulls his head back to run his tongue around the edge of the crown, sucks like he’s getting paid to do it.  Nathan looks down past the edge of his bobbing jaw, sees his twenty still tucked into Wade’s collar, and laughs, voice rough.  “This the cocksucking you give anyone for twenty dollars?”

Wade makes a noise that sounds exactly like a smart remark with a dick shoved into it, and his fingers disappear from around Nathan’s wrists.  One of them goes down between his legs, and his shoulder begins to move in rhythm as his mouth goes a little looser, the movements of his head graceless and eager.

He can’t see where the other hand, which is in deeper shadow, goes, but he keeps his own on the wall, hips jerking a little when Wade draws in a breath through his nose and starts moaning around him like he’s putting on a show for an audience.  His body strings itself out rigidly with his shoulders and arms pressed to the wall, the rest of him arching off of it, a wire-tight curve of muscle.

“You touching yourself?”  he gets out, knowing Wade is, and feeling that slightest hint of dangerous teeth again when Wade nods.  He swallows, gathers himself to sound authoritative instead of like he’s pleading.  “ _Stop_.”

Wade makes a high noise, a whine of dismay that turns into a hard vibration around him, but his shoulder stops moving, after a few more strokes.  He looks up, eyes hazy and indistinct in the low light, and then he goes down all the way to the base, like it’s easy, like it’s nothing, holds himself there like he’s never even heard of gagging.

Nathan tries to repress his shudder and fails.  “Get me off and I’ll touch you.”

Suddenly, the hand he’d lost track of is feeling its way up between his legs, and Wade makes a lower, almost pained sound when his finger slips wetly across Nathan’s skin, starts fucking his mouth on him again, this time like he can’t do it fast enough to satisfy himself as two of his fingers slide up and inside, pressed tightly against each other inside him. If Nathan were seventeen again, and doing this for the first time, how easily they fit into him would probably make him blush, but he got over that a long time ago.  Now, he just enjoys it, throws his head back against the wall again and shuts his eyes while Wade works him up, his right hand finding Nathan’s left wrist again, holding it to the wall with a cuff of fingers that couldn’t hope to actually pin it while his left hand finds a fitful rhythm between his legs.

He isn’t trying to prolong it, not here.  That no one has walked by yet and wolf-whistled is probably only luck, or maybe Wade yelled at everyone in the bar to stay put for fifteen minutes while he was on his way out.  Nathan wouldn’t put it past him.  So when Wade twists and crooks his fingers at the same time he shoves his mouth back down around him, the head trapped tight at the entrance to his throat, the warm slide of his tongue against the underside of his cock inescapable, Nathan doesn’t bother to hold back, grinds into his mouth and comes with a huff of breath that feels torn out of him.

“Warn a guy,” Wade complains, voice scratchy as he pulls off and Nathan starts tucking himself back in with clumsy fingers, feeling dizzy and stupid with it.  The T-O hand always works a little better than his other hand at times like this, muscles never orgasm-weak, so he uses that to haul Wade up off the ground by his collar the second he slips his fingers out of him, yank him forward for a kiss that knocks the brim of the hat back, tasting unpleasantly like skin and come, sharp with too many teeth.

“Sorry,” he replies, unrepentant, and uses his flesh hand to grab Wade’s wrist before he can wipe his hand off on his jeans.  He doesn’t have any sort of special feelings about the taste of himself, but it’s worth it for the look on Wade’s face when he slides those two fingers into his mouth and sucks it off, running his tongue down the seam between them.  The strangled noise Wade makes when Nathan pulls them out clean and smirks at him is close to priceless.

“You’re a _filthy_ _bastard_ , aren’t you.  Where were you hiding _this_ , in one of your ten thousand pockets?  I’ve never met anyone who wears cargo pants who wasn’t a little dirty, so maybe there’s something to that.”

Nathan drags him into another kiss to shut him up and then shoves his flesh hand into the waistband of Wade’s pants, feeling lace catch against the gun callouses on his fingertips, wet with precome.  His T-O hand drops from Wade’s collar to his ass.

Which is buzzing.

“Your phone’s ringing,” he says against Wade’s jawbone, still rubbing him through the lace.

Wade coughs out a laugh.  “Thanks, Siri.  Would you buy it if I said it was a vibrator?”

“Answer it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Pick up the phone, Wade.”  Nathan sucks Wade’s ruined earlobe into his mouth, grazes over it with his teeth before he noses his way behind his ear to smear his mouth along the vein pulsing erratically there.  The scent of him is strong just below his jaw, twice as heady and nearly choking when Nathan is coming down from an orgasm, and he licks over the sweat there as Wade fumbles the phone icon across his screen and raises it to his ear.

“Hello?  If this is Celine Dion’s people again, you’re going to have to call me back about our creative differences later, I’m busy murdering the pool boy who fucked me, I’m sure she’s familiar with the dilemma.”

At the first words on the other end, Nathan feels him tense, and then Wade’s hand is scrambling to hit the speaker button and hold the phone out flat.  A hissing voice suddenly cuts through the warm space between them, harsh and quiet, probably female but too damaged to be certain.  “ — why you haven’t finished yours.  I’ve finished mine.”

Nathan pulls away from him so fast he almost hits his head on the brick wall.

“My good massacring gun is in the shop, honey, don’t worry, I’ll finish,” says Wade, almost coolly.  He’s still got his fly unzipped, the bulge of his cock covered in red fabric that looks black in the dim swelling through it, and he’s still half-pressed into Nathan, but his demeanor has abruptly shifted to a sort of detached calm, unlike anything else he’s ever displayed.

 _I’ve finished mine?_ Nathan mouths at him, and gets no response.

The voice on the phone crackles like the speaker is going out.  “It’s been almost a month and a half. None of them are _dead_.”

“I’ve just been busy murdering my own conscience first while seeing if you’d give me a call and reconsider,” Wade says, still sounding indifferent, stepping back.  “Couple of them are kids.  I usually charge extra for that shit.  Lucky you for getting the sympathy discount thanks to the face thing.”

There’s silence on the other end of the line.  Nathan wants to mouth _you fucking moron_ at him, but he’s still stuck on _I’ve finished mine_.  What it has to mean.  They’d assumed the list was everything, but they shouldn’t have.

“They’re mutants.  Not children,” says the woman, curt and military, so sure of herself that Nathan tastes bile, feels any vestiges of remaining warmth between them dissolving.  “Get over yourself.  I’ll do it if you won’t.”

“Ye of little faith!  I’m hurt.”

“I hired you to save me time.  You’re not doing that.”

The emotionless edge in Wade’s voice begins to make Nathan uncomfortable when he speaks again.  It’s probably just a bit, he thinks, a way to get over acting like he’s going to go out and kill four kids, when they both know damn well he would never.  He’s still talking shit like it’s a game, only he doesn’t seem to be finding himself funny anymore. It’s eerie.  Wade with all the edges and none of the accompanying mirth is more chilling than it is professional.  “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m not turning down seven million.  I’ll do mine.  Did you only give me half?  I’m offended you didn’t trust me with the full monty.”

“I’m not going to wait another month for you,” she says, and the line goes dead.

Wade looks at him, eyes blank.  “I think we’d both have enjoyed the handjob you were about to give me _way_ more than that, but sure, _pick up the phone, Wade_.”

“I don’t think — ”

“Relax, baby, I suddenly have a headache too,” Wade says, and zips up his pants.  It’s not an incorrect characterization of what Nathan was about to say, even if it is a little unfair, so he doesn’t object, but then Wade waves, takes another step back, and Nathan realizes he’s about to leave, but doesn’t reach out to grasp his wrist.  Without knowing quite why, he thinks trying to keep him here would be a bad idea.  “I’ll see you next Wednesday.”

Wade jogs away.  He doesn’t follow, either, because Wade is faster than he is, and trying to chase him would be more of an embarrassment than a productive use of his time.

Nathan doesn’t realize he’s still wearing the Playboy cap until he’s gone.


	3. C4.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you're reading this thinking, boy, this plot is terrible and no one thought through it! why are they having all this sex and not advancing the actual story! the answer is that i am terrible, and this was intended to be ONLY sex until it grew a plot which i absolutely did not plan at all! if you are thinking why is there all this plot in my porn, then this chapter will please you because several thousand words of it is straight up fuckin.
> 
> unless the word "cunt" is gonna get to you, in which case do not read this. i did warn you in the first chapter that nate was going to have two fully functional reproductive systems. (well, fully is something of an exaggeration. but still)

After he gets back from Westchester the next day, he starts doing a refined search.  Last month and a half.  Murders of mutant children and teenagers.  Comes up with a depressingly high number.  It’s hard to link any six of them together — police databases aren’t seeing any connections, as far as he can tell, and he’s not well-equipped to do forensic comparisons, particularly with what little evidence is here — and maybe there aren’t six.  Maybe there aren’t any.  Maybe she pawned off the kids on Deadpool, and he and Domino were just leftovers.  Maybe she was just talking smack, except that doesn’t make sense, because as far as she knows, there’s no reason that would hurt Wade.

 _Unusual bullet_ , reads one file, dated one week ago, for a crime occurring a month back.  He’s been looking at pictures of dead kids for hours, and he feels like he’s been hollowed out, but _unusual bullet_ catches his eye.

He looks at the pictures.

The bullet _is_ unusual. Realizing the necessity of getting used to the technology of the day when his own ammo eventually runs out, he’s bought a probably suspicious number of bullets from stores all over the city, and none of them look like this one.  True, he hasn’t been buying much in the way of dangerous game ammo — although he’s got some on hand with the Juggernaut, specifically, in mind — so maybe he doesn’t have a good basis for comparison, since that’s what these clearly are.  But the analyst has confirmed his suspicion.  The metals aren’t normal.  They’re harder, non-expanding solids that probably wouldn’t even dent when they hit their targets, except the hollow front cores, designed to bloom and stick in flesh.

 _His_ bullets look more like this bullet than they do like the ones he’s bought here, although it would still be like comparing humans to troglodytes to hold the bullet from the file up next to one of the ones he brought from his time.

He does some more research, and can’t find a bullet anywhere that looks like the one in the file.  The jacket is what seals it for him, a brass alloy that, as far as he can tell, isn’t on the market at all in this day and age.

So he does another police file search, this time looking for firearms reports.  For more bullets like this one.

Two teenagers.  One adult.  She favors head shots, which he would admire as a matter of marksmanship if there weren’t three mutants dead with her bullets in them.  Three missing, if there are six to match Wade’s list, but maybe they haven’t been found yet.  Maybe the analysis hasn’t been done.  Maybe the police station that covers it doesn’t use electronic databases, or he’s not looking in the right place.  He swears quietly and uses the payphone outside the motel to call Domino.

“We’re clear to extract the kids,” he tells her, as soon as she picks up the phone.  “Better divide and conquer to lose less time.  Got a couple of casualties already.”

To her credit, Domino doesn’t ask him to explain.  “Give me the address.”

He gives her Theresa Cassidy, figures Wade can handle Samuel Guthrie, since he’s already proven he relates to teenage boys with ease.  But when he dials the home number, Blind Al picks up instead.  She laughs when he asks her to give Wade a message.  He can hear banging on the other end of the line, like someone is hitting a wall with a frying pan, and decides it’s better not to ask. “Oh, he’s way ahead of you, honey,” she says.

Wade doesn’t pick up his cell phone, so Nathan heads for Roanoke, Virginia.

Tabitha Smith isn’t at her home, and she isn’t at her school, but when he accesses the police database, no one has filed a missing persons report.  Her father is drunk at eleven in the morning.  With a sinking feeling in his stomach, he finds another pay phone and calls Domino again, trying not to believe the worst but knowing that it’s probably true.  “You get Cassidy?”

“Of course.  Did you give Tabitha to Wade?  I thought you said you were giving him Sam.”

“ — what?”

“She was there when I dropped Theresa off.  I think he probably kidnapped her, since, you know.  No one in their right mind would give him their child.”

“Jesus.”  Nathan rubs his face with his hand, relief flooding him.  “Thought she’d killed her already.  That idiot.”

He thinks: he can’t beat Wade to Kentucky.  But he can beat him to Colorado, probably.

“Go for Guthrie next,” he decides.  “He’ll probably have gotten him already, but we might as well cover our bases. I’ll go for Moonstar.”

“Is there a reason you don’t know where he is?”

“Oh, I got Guthrie’s address for you.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I’m not his fucking keeper.”

“I would ask his keeper, but Colossus was teaching when I went by.”

Nathan snorts. “I’ll let you know when I got her.”

In Colorado, he’s greeted with an empty house and a yellow sticky note on the door with a bright red Deadpool mask drawn on it in permanent marker.  That sticky note would have been nice in Roanoke, he thinks bitterly, and tucks it into his pocket.  As always, his calculations about Wade’s motions had been slightly off.  Skip Theresa to throw Nathan off, since she was closest, go for Tabitha because he has a soft spot for juvenile delinquents, then Kentucky would make the most sense, since it’s closer than Colorado, but he guesses that’s his mistake, ever expecting Wade to make sense.  Next time, he thinks, he’ll bet on crazy.

“That stupid dildo,” he says when he calls Domino again and she tells him she’s in the car with Samuel Guthrie.  His T-O hand is fisted around the side of the phone box, denting the metal of it in his irritation.  “I don’t know why the fuck he’s playing hide and fucking seek when we’re trying to keep these kids safe.”

“I think they call it playing hard to get when you’re over thirty.”

Nathan hangs up on her laughter.

 

True to his word, Wade is nowhere to be found until the next Wednesday, although Nathan checks back with Xavier when he gets back from Colorado and finds that all four of the kids are there, and so is Danielle Moonstar’s grandfather.  It’s probably the safest place for them, for the time being, although he’s glad he doesn’t have any duty of care, because it makes him uncomfortable to be so near telepaths when his head is full of things they shouldn’t know, with no real, robust ability to protect himself if they wanted to look into his head, thanks to the virus.

The clearest indication that Wade is still feeling like a failure — the only theory to explain his behavior that Nathan has constructed over the last week that held up under any intellectual pressure — is that he’s wearing his mask even in the bar, half-rolled up over his nose, pressing his ever-present manic grin into the rim of a rocks glass.  Nathan sits down at the barstool next to him, inclines his head to Domino on the other side of him before he starts in.  “You want to explain yourself?”

Wade looks at him, and without being able to see his eyes, Nathan can see the moment he notices the fact that he’s wearing the Playboy hat from the way his scarred Adam’s apple twitches in his throat.  “I didn’t want to take my chances with you being around more kids who the future thinks need killing, obviously.”

Nathan tries to think of the fact that he doesn’t have dental insurance in order to dissuade himself from grinding his teeth.  “ _Don’t_ waste my time like that again.”

Wade laughs, sounding easy even though he’s probably physically incapable of looking or behaving like he’s ever experienced a moment of calm.  “Yeah, going through airport security with that arm has to be a _bitch_.”

“I took the train.”

“That takes like, two days,” Domino puts in.  “No wonder he beat you there.”

“Two and a half.”

“Well, that’s just a bigger waste of your time than it needed to be,” Wade points out, reaching over to clink his glass into Nathan’s beer bottle like they’re toasting.  “And super not my fault, so quit pouting.  Do something constructive with your time.  Take up scrapbooking.  Work your pain out in the form of an interpretive dance if joking isn’t your thing.”

Domino takes a sip of her drink.  “If Cable tries to kill you again I’m not going to stop him.”

“He’d never kill me,” Wade says, and reaches a hand proprietarily over to pet Nathan’s cheek.  “He likes me too much.”

Nathan smacks his hand away, but he doesn’t get out a knife, so Wade just grins.

Weasel pops up over the lip of the bar.  “He’s tried to kill you like, twelve times.”

It’s been almost two months since Nathan came back in time to kill Russell Collins.  In that time, the sound of Wade trading cheap talk with whoever’s close enough to throw him a barb has become almost white noise, so usual Nathan barely needs to take note of it.  He finishes three beers listening to the give and take of it, just enough to give him a buzz since around 43% of his body can’t process alcohol.

Dopinder joins them for about an hour, then offers to drive Domino home when she leaves.  Nathan wonders for a second if that’s his way of trying to put the moves on, but if that were true there’s probably no way Wade wouldn’t have fucked him by now.  He’s pretty sure Wade hasn’t fucked him, but he guesses he wouldn’t bet his life on it.

Wade bumps his shoulder into his about fifteen minutes after they leave and shakes him out of his thoughts. “Are we having a hard-drinking night, or just still pouting?”

Three beers over two hours, with the weight of his actual body being what it is, is around a 0.05 BAC.  Probably more like a 0.04, since it’s been a little longer than that and he metabolizes quickly.  Hard drinking is pushing it either way.  He decides not to point this out, because he knows Wade will just call him a string of filthy words that will boil down to “boring pedant” if he does.

Weasel looks at him shrewdly, and shrugs one rounded shoulder.  “Eh, he’s still good to drive.”

“Still pouting, then.  Get the man some hard liquor, Weas, sulking is thirsty business.  You seem like a moonshine guy.  It’s the rugged good looks. I’d pay, but I’m hard up right now, you know how it is when your seven million dollar jobs are doing their own killing.”

“Vodka. And I’m not pouting.”

“Turn that frown upside down, buttercup. Lying is a terrible look on you.”

Nathan turns to give him a look, just as Weasel slides a shot of vodka across the bar at him.  “Just because I’m not running my mouth like you doesn’t mean I’m angry.”

“No, but you complaining about me running it does.  I know you like my mouth, babydoll, you don’t have to bother hiding it.”

That mouth is turned up into a thin, scarred stretch of white teeth, so clean they’ve probably been knocked out recently.  There’s no way to tell if it was one of the kids or if he did it himself or if he picked a fight so someone would do it for him.  Nathan looks at him for a moment, hiding under his mask from himself, then takes the shot glass off the counter and bolts it down, smacking the base back onto the bar when he’s done.

Then he takes off his hat and flips it around, hooking Wade’s head with it before he can blink, and drags him off the stool with an iron grip on the brim.  Wade almost falls, but with grace Nathan had known he’d find before he hit the floor, he keeps himself upright and even manages to move into the motion of Nathan pulling him forward, turning the improvised leash into more of a dance partner who’s insisted on leading him.

“Hey!  That’s my good neck! I use that one to hold up my head!”

“If you get his blood everywhere you’re cleaning it up,” Weasel calls as Nathan drags him towards the exit, like he has the balls to make Nathan do it.

Wade ducks out of the hat as soon as he’s managed to step into the right pace to keep up, the friction of it pulling his mask up another half inch.  Nathan puts it back on his head as they step into the dim neon glow outside, and doesn’t need look at him to know he’s following.  “If you’re actually going to beat the shit out of me, you should know my limits are choking and scat and I know you know I swallow, but I’m saving kissing for marriage.  Also, my safeword is your wife’s name.”

“I’m not going to beat the shit out of you.  And I already kissed you.”

“You were a lot more fun before you liked me.  I mean, where am I going to go for that good R-rated violence if your unnecessary murder boner is all tired out?  Domino’s too efficient and Colossus won’t even spank me.”

Nathan picks the sentences apart for a moment in his head, then decides not to respond to them.  “I promised you something.”

Wade jogs up ahead of him and then turns around, walking backwards, presumably so Nathan can get the full effect of the way he cocks his head to the side.  He’s pulled his mask down over his chin. “Gritty Rufus says what?”

“Rufus?”

“I know you were definitely talking about your regular boner, but now we have to watch Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure instead.”

It’s truly fucking unbelievable, Nathan thinks, that this guy is what turns him on now, when he doesn’t even understand half the shit that comes out of his mouth.  “Jesus.”

“You’re supposed to say ‘bogus.’”

“Do you want to fuck or not?”

“I’m not wearing my good panties.”

“That a no?”

Wade is silent for a moment.  “It’s been like, two months, right?  You aren’t about to kidnap me for a week to use me like a sex toy, are you?  You seem like the kind of guy who would do that.”

If he thought Wade meant that, Nathan would be insulted enough to go home alone, but Wade would probably be long fucking gone already if he actually thought that.  “ _You_ kidnapped two kids this week, idiot.”

“Only because you didn’t get to them first.”

“I’m not asking you to see me through my — ”  He thinks about using the word _heat_ , but finds it distasteful.  If Wade is going to laugh, let him laugh.  If he’s going to pretend to be confused, then he’s welcome to that too.  “ — oestrus.  I’m asking you if you want to fuck.”

“In that case, how can I say no?  But it’s an extra hundred to leave the lights on, just so you know.  And I only do piss stuff if you _promise_ not to put down tarps.”

 

Nathan hasn’t even shut the door behind them when Wade sees the panties hanging over the bedpost.  “Oh, boy, you definitely jerked off with those, didn’t you,” he says, immediately.  “That’s hot.”

“No.”

Wade turns to him for a long, silent pause, then shakes his head. “You’re telling the truth.  That’s so boring.  God, why even bother stealing them if you’re not going to tie that shit around your dick like a bow every couple of days?”

Nathan takes the hat off again and puts it over the other bedpost. “Take your pants off.”

“What, no foreplay?”

“I’m going to suck your dick.”

Wade tears off his pants so fast he actually trips onto the bed.  Nathan throws out a hand to keep him from going over the foot of it, more out of reflex than anything.  “You want to take off your shoes first, you dumb chucklefuck?”

“You said _pants_.”

Now he fucking follows orders, Nathan thinks as he gets down on his knees next to the bed.  Wade’s cock is still soft, and his well-muscled legs are as scarred as his face, a repetitive, convulsive twitch going down one of his thighs as he bounces his foot against the floor.  He’s nervous, Nathan realizes, or something close to it, vibrating with ill-contained energy.  The situation probably calls for emotional intelligence, but what that even means when Wade Wilson is involved is uncertain, so instead he decides to go with brute force and shoves Wade’s legs apart, hands on his hips dragging him to the edge of the bed and pulling his thighs over Nathan’s shoulders.

Wade makes a shocked noise, upper half falling back onto the bed as his hands grab for something to keep him upright and don’t find anything but Nathan’s hair, which he tugs painfully enough in freefall that Nathan growls at him without thinking about it.

“Oh, boy, we do _not_ want to talk about what that just did for me,” Wade says, like Nathan can’t see his cock filling out against his thigh.  The twitching in his leg has stilled.  “I haven’t been with an omega since before I popped my knot, are you one of the ones that gets feral?  Can you act like you are?  Kind of feeling the idea of being absolutely _mauled_.”

Nathan pauses with his mouth a breath away from Wade’s dick, and frowns.  “Don’t call me that.”

“I am _allowed_ to talk dirty to you right now.  I want to do shit to you that is only technically legal over international waters and in the murder haven in Yellowstone Park.  I’m talking movies that can only be shown in France level.  Stuff that lesser men would chop their own dicks off for even considering.”

Despite his increasingly creative protests, Nathan thinks he can be assured that Wade probably won’t push too hard on that pressure point because he won’t want to jeopardize getting his dick wet, so he mouths at Wade’s inner thigh, running his tongue into the dips in his skin just a little before he sucks a bruise into the muscle that blooms and fades in seconds.  The skin should be objectively unappealing, dark spots under the thin upper layer where abscessed fluid probably lies hiding between ridges of shifting scar tissue, but there’s something viscerally attractive about how Wade reacts to Nathan putting his mouth on it — fingers tightening in his hair and hips flexing like he’s begging with them — that makes it difficult to describe it with any adjective less positive than “captivating.”  When he bites down on the slim muscle right at the crux of Wade’s leg and pelvis, delicately running his tongue around the pitted skin at the inside of his teeth, Wade swears in three languages, writhing like he’s gutshot.

His dick is just as mutilated as the rest of him, Nathan notices, mouth abruptly feeling dry when he realizes it’s probably just as sensitive.  Moreover, it’s hard against his cheek now, and leaking like he’s already put it in his mouth.  He uses his T-O hand to do just that, closing his eyes to focus and taking him as deep as he can, slow and steady.

Wade’s hands loosen in his hair as he does, and he makes a soft noise of abandon, the opposite of the reaction Nathan had imagined he’d have.  “Remember how I sucked your dick for twenty dollars?” he says, sounding dazed.  “You’re doing this for _free_.  That’s _insane_. I would pay you so much for service like this.”

Nathan opens his eyes to look up at him and hopefully convey the message that the dirty talk could use work, but when he does Wade turns his head from where he’s clearly been staring at Nathan’s face with a groan that will probably make the people in the room next to him think Nathan’s killing someone in here, like he can’t bear to look at him.

“God,” he says, as Nathan starts to bob his head.  “You look like a fucking Tom of Finland drawing on your knees, Nate.  If he was like, really into toaster ovens one day.  And the old folks’ home.  You know what I mean.  You’re built like a fuckable tank.  Who am I kidding?  All tanks are fuckable if you know where to look for the right hole.”

Nathan makes a rough noise of distaste around him and Wade nearly triggers his gag reflex with the way his hips snap upwards, uncontrolled.

“Please, _please_ tell me you’re touching yourself,” Wade croaks.

He isn’t, but as soon as Wade says it, he reaches for his fly, pushing his belt apart one-handed first and then reaching inside.

“I mean, I’ll understand if you aren’t, but it would get me so hot if you were.  Like, just even one finger.  Not that I’m not already going to be jerking off thinking about this for the rest of my life.”

Nathan switches from taking himself in hand to reaching further back, fingers grazing shallowly over his slit — no room for going deep in the cramped space he has to work in, flesh hand uncomfortably pressed into the divide of the zipper.  He deliberately hums around Wade and then sucks hard on the crown to draw his eyes and catch the moment he realizes where his hand has gone.  His face is unexpressive with the mask on, but it’s impossible to miss the way his head falls back like he can’t help it, dick twitching in Nathan’s mouth.

Whatever Wade says next is nearly incoherent — the words individually make sense, but seem to be arranged in an order not previously known to man — so Nathan stops listening to him and focuses on making it good, tight suction and soft tongue, which is how he misses it when Wade desperately tells him that he’s about to come. He doesn’t miss the hands pulling at his hair, and raises his head to ask _what_ just in time to get hit across the mouth and cheek with Wade’s spend, hot and wet and mercifully, not in his fucking eye.

He’s made that mistake before.  He’s never made it since; Aliya laughed at him for weeks every time he offered to suck her off, remembering his swearing.

“Okay, I’m tapping out,” Wade says hoarsely, like he’s the one who just had a dick in his mouth, the black patches on the mask tilted towards Nathan as he pulls his hand out of his pants, fingertips glistening slightly, and raises it to his face to wipe the spunk off it. He swipes his fingers across the top sheet, leaving tacky wetness behind.  “You win the wet t-shirt contest.”

Nathan gets up, ignoring whatever that means — his knee twinges, informing him it doesn’t like that position — and heads for the bathroom to wash his face, leaving Wade alone on the bed for a moment.

Splashing water on his face and finger-combing his disheveled hair back into place, he feels curiously that everything is more real than it has been since he used his last charge on Wade. There’s silence from outside the bathroom, and he’s half-sure that he’s going to resurface to an empty room.  It would seem in-character for Wade to leave now.  After all, they’re even.  Nathan doesn’t owe him anymore.

“We don’t have to be even, you know,” Wade calls, like he knows what Nathan is thinking, or like his stream of conscious babbling has somehow, some way, aligned with Nathan’s own. “I could be persuaded to get you off again.  I mean, you just persuaded me.  And I’ve always got another round in the chamber anyway, so we _could_ stay even.”

Nathan reemerges from the bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head without preamble and throwing it on the desk chair before reaching down to undo his boots.  Once they’re gone, he walks towards the bed and watches the tremor in Wade’s thigh start up again, so instead of drawing it out, he drops his pants unceremoniously and straddles Wade’s lap, stark naked.  With the way Wade’s been behaving, he expects to ride him to another orgasm while he begs like he hasn’t already come once, then wake up alone tomorrow morning.

Instead, Wade catches him by the ass as he settles and twists his body in a move Nathan doesn’t quite catch all of in his surprise, but which ends with Nathan on his back on the bed, Wade wedged between his legs, thin hips propping them open.  Nathan’s not light, close to three hundred and fifty pounds of mesh and muscle, but Wade knows how to leverage his strength, makes it look easy.  “Huh,” he says, dragging his hands down Nathan’s sides.  “I kinda thought you’d have stretch marks, when I was thinking about you naked and having a playdate with my junk.”

Nathan looks up at him, not sure how to take that.  “I do have stretch marks.”

“What, these?”  Wade brushes his finger against the edge of a thin silver stripe that’s almost hidden underneath Nathan, decades-ago scarring from growing too tall too fast.  “No, I mean, because you had a kid.”

Either that’s a kink Nathan doesn’t know about, or Wade has a disturbingly vivid imagination that’s hungry for insignificant bullshit, possibly both.  Whichever way it pulls, it feels somehow like a compliment that Wade would fill in imagined details about him that are less than attractive while touching himself.  He hadn’t even been sure they were there, but he’d jacked off to the picture anyway, warts and all, which is either improbably sweet or extremely strange.  “I didn’t carry Hope.  Neither did Aliya.  I found her.”

“Anyway,” Wade says, after a two-beat silence, using his left hand to tweak Nathan’s nipple, “I’m going to bend her dad in half and deep-dick him until he’s screaming, so maybe we can have girly slumber party talk about her later.”

Nathan squeezes Wade’s waist with his legs to pull his top half close enough to get his hands on his collar, feeling for the catches in the mask.  “Ambitious.  Take off the mask.”

Wade slips his hand down between them instead, thoughtfully brushing his knuckles against the underside of his cock, and wriggles his middle finger into Nathan, not as smooth as last time because sucking dick doesn’t get him off the way getting his dick sucked does.  It’s patently a method of distraction, which isn’t to say it feels any less like the good kind of tease. “Why ruin the moment like that?”

“Because I don’t want to look at your stupid gimp suit while you fuck me.”

“Oh, well, I can fix that,” Wade says brightly, and pulls his finger out to get his hands back on Nathan’s hips.  To his credit, he makes a valiant effort to flip him over, but only manages to wrench Nathan’s spine a little because of the T-O side weighing him down, fortunately at a set of vertebrae that have already been replaced with metal.

Nathan gives him a shit-eating grin, and stretches his arms out behind his head, like he’s relaxing. “Not so easy now gravity’s not on your side?”

“God, you are so _fat_ for someone who’s never been pregnant,” Wade complains, but starts undoing the collar.  “Let’s compromise on halfway.”

He pushes it back up to partway over his face, the tip of his nose just peeking out, with his scarred jaw on display, razor-sharp smile sheathed behind his thin lips.  Nathan studies him for a moment, and decides not to exert the full force of his will tonight.  “I can make that work.  Put your finger back in me, lover boy.”

Wade quirks his mouth, like he thinks Nathan is giving him the reins.  “Should make you do it for being a bitch about this.”

Nathan snorts, then pushes him backwards a little to get his hand down between them, pushing his mostly-hard cock forwards onto his stomach so he can dip two fingers into his cunt, shallow at first, sliding through more than diving in.  “Don’t lie.  You’re lazy and watching me do this turns you on.”

“Can you blame me?” Wade says, bending over him to lick the edge of where his skin meets the T-O mesh.  The skin there is less enervated, with the metal beginning to steal through it, but the nerves that remain jangle with the sensation, unsure of what to make of it and firing overtime to make up for the fact that they’re all being slowly consumed.  It results in a sort of sparking burn crawling up his spine, a half-formed sting of pleasure.  “I mean, come on.  You look like military porn had an orgy with the freaky section of fanfiction.net, the abstract concept of my disappointed father, and a Roomba.  I’m not doing my best work here descriptively, but with you doing that right under me I think I can be excused.”

Nathan looks at him evenly and pushes his two fingers in with a slick noise, until his knuckles stop him.  Wade shudders, pulls back to look between his legs instead of at his eyes.  He wasn’t joking about having another round chambered, Nathan thinks with some wonder.  He can feel his dick, hard and still a little spit-sticky, pressing up against the back of his thigh.  How Wade’s healing factor could possibly think an orgasm needed healing is beyond him, but it’s convenient for his purposes, so he chooses not to question it.

He draws his fingers out with a barely-audible sucking sound and Wade makes a noise like he’s the one getting fingered, pitchy and desperate.  “If you didn’t have me in a vise here I’d _definitely_ put my face in that, god, you hot old bastard,” he says, tugging against Nathan’s legs without any real conviction.

Nathan picks up the pace, uses his free hand to jack himself since Wade can’t even be bothered to do that.  “I thought you were saving kissing for marriage.”

Like Wade can hear what he’s thinking, he puts his index finger into the space between Nathan’s two and slides it in along with them when Nathan does, all easy coordination.  He’s wet enough now that it slips in without much resistance, and Wade flexes the digit, questing for a spot that he doesn’t immediately find.  “Don’t worry about my virtue, Timecop, it doesn’t count when you’re just doing mouth stuff.  I have it on good authority Jesus is fine with anal and oral and a little bit of over the clothes dry humping action.  You just have to save room for him to wedge himself in between you and make it a threesome.”

“Little further in,” Nathan tells him, skimming over the weird shit.

Wade’s fucking terrible at following directions in general, but he gets this in one.  “He shoots, he scores,” he whispers when Nathan grinds his hips down onto his hand, the muscles in his abdomen twitching.  “Is it like the Quiet Place where you live or something?  You make less noise than anyone I’ve ever fucked.”

“You know I don’t know what that is.”  Nathan pulls his fingers out, pushes Wade’s hand away.  “You said you were going to make me scream, so fuck me.”

“Wait, you forgot the boring part.”  Nathan is about to tell him it doesn’t matter anymore, that he can’t have kids and knows neither of them is sick, but Wade digs a condom out of his shirtfront pocket, the grin on his face looking so reminiscent of the expression Aliya makes when she’s victorious that he just waits while Wade fumbles it on, somehow seeming clumsy and graceless at the same time as he makes it plain he’s done this a thousand times before.  “Ta da.”

Wade tries to go slow, probably to tease if the smirk on his face is anything to go by, but Nathan thinks he’s had the illusion of control a little too long.  After the head works into him, he constricts his legs and pulls Wade into the crook of them in one smooth, inexorable motion.  It’s too fast, leaves him breathing hard, and it feels wet and blunt and the unfamiliar stretch aches with the speed, but Wade’s jaw drops and he makes a noise that sounds like someone is strangling him, which makes it worth his while.  “Oh my _god_ ,” he says, sounding disoriented and turning his head away to look at the curtained window instead of at Nathan.  “We almost just fucking embarrassed ourselves there, guys.”

“You’re still fucking embarrassing yourself,” Nathan tells him, but it’s hard to make it sound insulting when his voice feels strained.  It’s been a while, and it’s been even longer since there was someone who wasn’t Aliya inside him.  Wade feels maybe longer than her, but he might be imagining it.  He definitely feels _different_ , skin the same texture as the rest of his body spreading him just irregularly enough to be able to feel it, like a thick rope of scar tissue seated in him.

Wade flashes his teeth, sharp canines on display, and draws out enough for Nathan to feel it like a huff of air being forced out of his lungs when he pushes back in.  “Nice try, honeybunches, but I can feel you crushing my dick like a tin can in the scary part of the ocean.”  One of his hands flattens over Nathan’s stomach, pushing in a little like he thinks he’s going to be able to feel himself through the muscle there, and the other steals between his legs to touch the seam of his cunt, gently in counterpoint to the thrusting that’s beginning to pick up.  “It’s like a mood ring down here, old man.  And you’re feeling…”  His finger just barely makes a play at stealing in with his cock, and Nathan feels his hips buck without his say-so, not sure whether he wants it or not, a choked breath escaping him.  “… wow, super horny.  Gotta say, I didn’t peg you for a slut, but you’re taking it like one.”

Aliya would _never_ say that shit to him.  In his shock, Nathan bares his teeth at him, knees tightening at his ribs like a threat to break them, but his warning snarl comes out breathless.

“Don’t worry,” Wade says, in the tone of a confession, bending over him to put his mouth as high as he can reach towards Nathan’s ear, teeth grazing the T-O side of his collarbone.  He can’t really _feel_ with the T-O, but it sends him signals all the same, harsh and electric.  “Most of my favorite people are sluts.  You should see the shit Al gets up to when she’s got that creaky old engine revved.  _Meow_.”

Nathan reaches up and hooks his fingers into the space next to Wade’s nose where the mask gapes a little, jerks his head up to face him. “If you won’t stop saying shit like that and fuck me like you mean it, I’m going to put you on your back and do it myself.”

Wade laughs at him.  Another person that voice doesn’t work on, which makes two, Nathan has time to think before Wade grabs him by the hips, pulls them up, T-O weight and all, and gets his knees under him to start putting the lean muscles sliding under his fucked-up skin to use with a new, pounding rhythm.  “That’s not really as much of a deterrent as it probably felt like when you said it?”

Nathan doesn’t answer, but he does prop himself up on his elbows to give himself leverage to meet the thrusts, planting the T-O leg on the sheets to keep driving whenever Wade loses pace for a minute, unable to maintain consistency because he seems to keep having different thoughts about how the fuck ought to go.  He’s intriguingly random about it, occasionally hitting a hard stroke that seems accidental and makes Nathan see stars, but despite the fact that it’s good, so good in fact that Nathan’s stomach is quivering, sweat beginning to shine in the notch of his sternum, the randomness’ downside is that Nathan can’t get off on this level of unpredictability.  Every time he starts to find a groove, it shifts, dragging him towards the edge and then yanking him back by a belt loop over and over.

His cock is drooling on his stomach, smearing translucent fluid into the grey hair lying there, and Wade leans down over him to mouth at his collarbone again, now scraping his teeth over the still-flesh hollow in the middle, and then down.  If licking was bad, this is a thousand times worse; Wade bites him just where the metal extends into the barely-living skin of his right pectoral and his flesh arm goes out from under him as an unruly jolt of sensation spikes through his blood.  He isn’t fully aware of the noise he must have made at that, but when he drags his head back up off the sheets Wade is grinning crazily at him like whatever it was has made his night.  “Shh,” he pants. “If you’re not quiet, They’ll hear you.”

Nathan has had moments with Aliya so wild they felt almost like fighting, let her bond him on the bare fucking earth, and this is still somehow the most chaotic fuck he’s ever had. Wade’s cock drags erratically through him while his rabbiting hips glance salt-coarse over the backs of Nathan’s thighs, mouth threatening the skin of his chest, and it’s all somehow a surprise and exactly what he should have expected at the same time.

Giving up on not touching himself, he gets a hand down between them, curling his fingers around his length to jack himself with a dry hand, the friction too rough but the cadence easier to work with than the uneven saw of Wade’s body into his.

He doesn’t say anything when he comes across his stomach, his body locking down on the base of Wade’s dick even though nothing is likely to grow there, one canine catching his lip so tightly it bleeds as he clenches his teeth together to keep a shred of dignity.  Wade rides it out for a few spare moments that seem like an eternity, drawing out the shocks running through Nathan’s body in a way that must be intentional, and then stills, mouth hanging open on a gasp of Barbra Streisand’s name.

It takes Nathan a few moments to gather his scattered thoughts.  Maybe Wade’s crazy is contagious, he thinks, pushing back against him to get him to disengage their bodies, the feeling of his softening length slipping free making the muscles in his legs twitch.  Wade collapses against his chest, making Nathan rumble in half-hearted protest.  “Wow, monogamy only made you boring in _most_ ways,” he chirps into Nathan’s collarbone after a minute of heavy breathing, clearly trying to sound cheery through a lungful of inadequate air.  “Yee haw.”

Nathan snorts at him, and strokes a hand down his back to soften the blow his next words could be, if he’s not careful. “Get off me.”

Obediently, Wade slithers backwards and stands up, their skin catching against each other’s, tacky with sweat and fluid, and Nathan closes his legs, the hinge of his right hip aching slightly from hard use as he moves around Wade to stand too. He heads for the bathroom again with a hitch in his step that makes Wade wolf-whistle at him.  When he’s run a washcloth over his stomach enough to make sure he isn’t going to wake up with his body hair glued into place, he gets back into bed.  Wade, his face entirely covered by his mask again, is looking for his underwear on the floor.

“Under the bed,” Nathan tells him.  “With your left shoe.”

“For a moment there I thought I was going to have to steal those,” Wade says, pointing to the bedpost after he’s retrieved them.  The Hawaiian shirt he’s been wearing has Nathan’s semen smeared all over the front, and when he shoves his still-wet dick into boxers, the condom nowhere to be seen, he looks the picture of bizarre obscenity.

Nathan closes his eyes so he won’t have to justify having slept with that picture to himself. “You already have a pair. And I didn’t get to see you in them last time.”

When he opens his eyes, Wade is gone.

 

Wade’s a dumbass, in a lot of ways, but he can count.  The next morning, Nathan wakes up feeling heavy in the pit of his stomach.  He’s been doing this for almost forty years, and he’s been watching his own body consume itself cell by cell for fifty-three, so he knows what the fuck is going on inside it, and he gives himself about two days to oestrus.  Now that he’s not fucking around with his hormones, it’s not going to take him by surprise again, out of turn.  He’s always been easy, regular.  Aliya used to pretend she could time it to the minute, which only she ever found funny.

He rolls out of bed to shower Wade’s scent off him, rub the crust of dried sweat out of his hair, remove the itchy remnants of sweat and slick out from between his thighs, and then he goes out.  He buys water bottles and protein bars at the grocery store, in futile hope that he’ll want to eat even though he knows damn well there’s no chance he’ll register the gnawing of hunger as anything but lust when he’s knee-deep in it.  His wife would want him to do it, so he does it.  He glances down the aisle that houses things like knee wraps and cold compresses to see if they sell anything that’ll ease the ache of emptiness, but of course this time is too puritanical for that.

“You seriously mean you don’t sell heat aids,” he says to the Null girl behind the counter.

“Heat — aids?”  For one beleaguered moment, Nathan thinks he’s going to have to explain the concept to her, but she just turns bright red and looks him up and down, throat working nervously.  She’s thinking, _No way, Jared’ll never believe me when I tell him this_ , so loudly he can almost hear it with his ears instead of his powers.  Funny, he thinks, the presumption in favor of the fact that no one who looks like him would go out to buy this for a partner is stronger than the presumption that no one who looks like him could possibly be buying it for himself.  Men in this time, or alphas, maybe, are not doing much to recommend themselves to posterity.  “Uh, there’s a sex shop down the street, sir?”

“It’s a fucking medical product,” Nathan says, exasperated, but it’s not her fault she was born and raised here, and no one but Wade and Domino will listen to him bitch about this time with any interest, so he doesn’t press it further.  He’d like the ability to pretend to be clinical about this, but he supposes when you cut to the bone of it, it’s fucking himself in a dirty motel room in sheets he’s not going to clean because the stale scent of sex will probably help after he’s reached the lordosis stage. He can treat it like a temporary illness all he wants, but it’s really just him and his body, face down and sweating for it.

Aliya hadn’t quite managed to break him of all his bad habits, he thinks ruefully as he pays for a dildo in a store around the corner called the Lion’s Den, ignoring the Break behind the counter who’s staring at him in a manner that would probably be surreptitious if Nathan weren’t a telepath, couldn’t hear him thinking _Jesus wept, never seen an omega that big before.  Who the fuck could hold that down_?

Aliya hadn’t quite managed to break him of all his bad habits, because with her gone there’s no incentive to think of oestrus as anything other than an unfortunate medical reality.  She’d always taken it as an opportunity for joy, a built-in excuse to feel good for a little while.  He was short and sweet at only two days, not dragging it out into a painful, tiring chafing marathon like the poor bastards who took all week, so she always ran him through his paces just enough to keep his sex-fogged brain mostly checked in, and had fun with him in the interim.

He misses her so much it feels like a fever sometimes.

Nathan turns back from the door, puts his hand at about shoulder height.  “My wife’s this tall,” he says, and the kid sputters, caught out.  _This tall_ is still taller than him.  Taller than most. “And she could beat your candy ass into submission in under a minute.”

“Okay, man, okay,” the kid returns, holding up his hands like Nathan is threatening him personally, instead of just bragging on his wife in a threatening manner.

Wade would’ve just laughed.  But then again, Wade’s not a fucking pussy.

He buys a cell phone, while he’s out, conceding to the convenience of it.  On the way back to the motel room, he has to step over a guy who’s passed out drunk in the parking lot at barely noon on a fucking Thursday.  Nathan decides after this cycle’s shitshow is over, he’s going to find somewhere else to live.

It’s as good a time as any, he thinks when he gets inside and puts the bags down, to explore where, in the future, that might be. Of course, maybe the bodyslide device is programmed to some sort of meeting place, or headquarters. Or, as he’d earlier worried, over the sea, or midair, or somewhere else that might kill him.  Thinking better of going without preparation, he outfits himself with his shield and a gun, some knives, his utility bag.  If he shows up in Westchester after all this, he’s going to be furious.  He digs the cuff out of the bag, and looks at it for a moment before he slips it on and activates the interface.  It blinks sluggishly at him, like it’s wondering if he’s sure.

“Bodyslide by one,” he says, and steps into the blue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway thanks to the fact that i'm in The Professional School That Shall Not Speak Its Name, the next (and last unless it gets out of my control) update will definitely, 100%, without a doubt be late. mucho stuff going on this week and i have only written like, a thousand words of it. it will be possibly a week late. sorry fam.

**Author's Note:**

> anyway, a couple people were like "bottom nate!" after my last one and my friend was like "there's no a/b/o in this fandom, you should write some" and so here i am. this au honestly isn't super my thing, so i did a bunch of reading beforehand to see what people usually put in these fics and suffice it to say that i absolutely did not give anyone what they want and i am very self-conscious about it, so be kind. i intended to write straight up porn but bc i was feeling weird about it, this grew a plot while i was stalling. i yoinked the villain without reading a single fuckin issue that she was in, so lmao if you're a purist you prob want to back away.
> 
> if i have to go back and add things later for plot purposes then i will regret posting this as chapters instead of just c/ping the whole monster in whenever i'm done with it! but i'm in the professional school that dare not speak its name (nate mentions it in this chapter) so i have no time and i don't want this to just die in my word doc and posting things will force me to finish it. i hope.
> 
> ALSO after i posted my last fic someone on omegle i was rping with used one of my descriptions while writing wade and i've never been more fucking flattered. ilu stranger. everyone come rp with us, it's only MOSTLY dead.


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